The Great Exodus: from The

38 World Transformation Movement – The Great Exodus 16th century English parliamentarian and author Fulke Greville: ‘Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity! Borne under one Law, to another bound: Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Created sicke, commanded to be sound: What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes? Passion and Reason, selfe-division cause:’ (Mustapha, c, 1594–96). As emphasised, while a conflict between our instincts/ ‘passion’ and our intellect/ ‘reason’ has long been recognised in mythologies and in the writings of some exceptionally honest thinkers, it is only science’s discoveries in the last century about the different ways genes and nerves process information that at last allows us to answer Greville’s all-important question, ‘What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes?’—what caused the conflicting situation? Greville is right when he said there were ‘Lawes’ involved in the conflict and while these laws don’t explain the conflict they are relevant in understanding how extremely upset by the conflict between our instinct and intellect we humans became. To explain the involvement of ‘Lawes’ raises the next issue to be looked at of what was humans’ original instinctive orientation because, as mentioned, it obviously wasn’t to a flight path such as birds have. The answer to this question is that our instinctive self was perfectly orientated to the law of integrative, cooperative meaning, which means that when we became conscious and defied our instinctive orientation and became upset, namely angry, egocentric and alienated, that divisive response then attracted extra criticism from our particular instinctive orientation making us doubly upset. There is much physics and biology to be explained before the compounding effect our particular instinctive orientation had on our upset behaviour is described however what will be revealed when that description is given in Section 26 is that our situation was much, much more frustrating than Adam Stork’s, and we can see that his was frustrating enough. 11. But what was humans’ original instinctive orientation? Of course humans aren’t birds with an instinctive orientation to a flight path, nevertheless we must have had our particular instinctive orientation to the world we were living in prior to becoming fully conscious which must, to a significant degree, still exist within us. All animals have an instinctive self and so do we. Carl Jung termed humans’ common, shared-by-all instincts ‘the collective unconscious’, as the following quote makes clear: ‘Jung regards the unconscious mind as not only the repository of forgotten or repressed memories, but also of racial memories. This is reasonable enough when we remember the definition of instinct as racial memory’ (International University Society’s Reading Course and Biographical Studies, Vol.6, c, 1940). The question then is what was our species’ original instinctive orientation? While we humans have an undeniable capacity for brutality, hatred and aggression— which we can now understand is our upset state—it is also true that we have an enormous capacity for love, kindness and compassion. It is further clear that we have an inbuilt awareness that such kind, considerate and caring behaviour is good and to be aspired to—after all, how could we have a sense of guilt, shame and recrimination about unkind thoughts and actions unless some deeper intrinsic part of ourselves felt at odds with such behaviour? The fact that we have called our born-with, instinctive awareness of what we have termed ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviour our ‘moral’ sense, and its ‘voice’, or expression from within us, our ‘conscience’, is indicative of this. This moral sense, this inclination to be caring and considerate of others, amounts to a social conscience. It is a capacity, in situations where the need arises, to behave altruistically, to put the welfare of others, ultimately of our community, above concern for our own welfare—such as when we are prepared to volunteer to fight and, if necessary, die for our country in war. 11. But what was humans’ original instinctive orientation? 39 While the Holy Grail of the Darwinian revolution has been to explain the dilemma of the human condition, the other, almost equally great mystery facing biologists has been to explain the origins of this moral sense in humans, for it is a truly extraordinary and special part of our makeup. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had these fitting words inscribed on his tomb, ‘there are two things which fill me with awe…the starry heavens above us, and the moral law within us’, while Charles Darwin was no less impressed when he said, ‘the moral sense affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’ (The Descent of Man, 1871). Darwin is acknowledging here that our moral sense is something distinctive to humans. Biologists have long recognised that there are many examples in nature of organisms behaving selflessly towards each other, such as bees and ants in their respective colonies; however they now recognise that these are situations of reciprocity where favours are given only in return for another, which means they are not truly unconditionally selfless, altruistic acts. In the case of sterile worker bees and ants, while they are unable to reproduce themselves, by selflessly helping their colony and its fertile queen who carries the genes responsible for their existence they are indirectly selfishly ensuring the reproduction of their own genes. Their selflessness is not unconditional because it is done to ensure their reproduction. Such reciprocal selflessness is not altruism but in fact a subtle form of selfishness. In the case of humans, when we sacrifice ourselves for others are we similarly merely concerned with selfishly fostering the reproduction of our genes, or is our moral sense truly altruistic in nature? Both Kant’s and Darwin’s comments infer that our moral sense is something extraordinary in the natural world, that is unique to humans and therefore not the subtle form of genetic selfishness that is common in other social species. The inference is that our moral nature is a truly altruistic, unconditionally selfless capacity to act out of genuine love and concern for the greater good of human society and indeed all the constituents of our planet, be they animate or inanimate. What will now be biologically explained in the following section of this book is that our moral sense is unique to humans; that we do indeed have an instinctive orientation to behaving in an unconditionally selfless, genuinely altruistic, all-sensitive, utterly cooperative, harmonious, loving way towards each other and indeed our entire planet. It will be further explained that we acquired this ‘awe’-inspiring instinctive orientation during a time before we humans became fully conscious and our upset angry, egocentric, alienated state emerged. Certainly there is recognition of this pre-conscious ‘Golden Age’ in all our mythologies. Hesiod, the 8th century BC Greek poet, wrote in his poem Theogony: ‘When gods alike and mortals rose to birth / A golden race the immortals formed on earth…Like gods they lived, with calm untroubled mind / Free from the toils and anguish of our kind / Nor e’er decrepit age misshaped their frame…Strangers to ill, their lives in feasts flowed by…Dying they sank in sleep, nor seemed to die / Theirs was each good; the life-sustaining soil / Yielded its copious fruits, unbribed by toil / They with abundant goods ‘midst quiet lands / All willing shared the gathering of their hands.’ In the Christian Bible a passage in Ecclesiastics says, ‘God made mankind upright [uncorrupted], but men have gone in search of many schemes [understandings]’ (7:29). Similarly, Christ talked of a time when God ‘loved [us] before the creation of the [upset] world’ (John 17:24), and a time of ‘the glory…before the [upset] world began’ (John 17:5). The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis tells us we were ‘created…in the image of God’ (1:27), presumably meaning we were once perfectly orientated to the cooperative, selfless, loving ideals of life, then Adam and Eve ate‘from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ (2:9&17) because it was ‘desirable for gaining wisdom’ (3:6) and would ultimately lead us to becoming ‘like God, knowing good and evil [understanding the upset state of our human condition and through doing that ameliorating it and returning to the cooperative, Godly ideal state]’ (3:3), but in the process we had to suffer being ‘banished… 40 World Transformation Movement – The Great Exodus from the Garden of Eden [idyllic state]’ (3:23) because of ‘sin [our upset state which had to one day be understood]’ (4:7). Zen Buddhism also recognises the loss of an uncontaminated, pure state due to the intervention of the conscious mind, referring to ‘the affective contamination (klesha)’ of ourselves by ‘the interference of the conscious mind predominated by intellection (vijnana)’ (Zen Buddhism & Psychoanalysis, D.J Suzuki, Erich Fromm, Richard Demartino, 1960, p.20). In the 1990 edition of Memories & Visions of Paradise, an extensive collection of references from mythologies of this ‘paradisal’ time in our past, author Richard Heinberg summarised that: ‘Every religion begins with the recognition that human consciousness has been separated from the divine Source, that a former sense of oneness…has been lost…everywhere in religion and myth there is an acknowledgment that we have departed from an original…innocence…the cause of the Fall is described variously as disobedience, as the eating of a forbidden fruit, and as spiritual amnesia [alienation]’ (pp.81–82 of 282). In his best selling book of 1987, The Songlines, the explorer and philosopher Bruce Chatwin wrote: ‘Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttarakurus or “the Men of Perfect Virtue” of the Taoists.

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