 "I Wonder Who We Are Except In Relation to Others?", Patti Digh
asked, somewhat rhetorically, in a recent IM conversation. No question
that we are social creatures, and that we cannot live a healthy life
alone. But we are more than just social
creatures -- we have an identity that is innate, a 'self' that we are
born with. But somehow, this innate self seems to be less and less 'us'
as the world becomes more crowded, interrelated and complex. And at the
same time, we seem, as a species, to be becoming less happy.
The reason for our modern unhappiness may be simple: We are not ourselves. Each of us actually has three 'selves' that are, increasingly, in conflict with each other.
'You' are, first of all, a complicity of your body's organs, evolved by them to protect them from dangers and to help coordinate their
actions and movements. Your body, collectively, through chemistry,
tells you to do some things in its interest: What to eat, what to feel,
who to love and lust for.
'You' are, secondly, what is programmed in your DNA, unconscious,
instinctive knowledge of how to survive that has evolved over three
million years. Your instincts tell you how to respond to situations you
don't have time or mental bandwidth to respond to: When to fight or
flee, what is really going on, what makes 'sense'.
And, thirdly, 'you' are what your culture indoctrinates you to be, in
order to be useful to it. Your culture tells you what to believe, what
is 'right' and 'wrong', who and what is 'good' and 'bad', how you
should live and make a living, and, in a battle with the first 'you',
what to eat, what to feel, and who to love and lust for.
When your physical 'you', your instinctive 'you' and your cultural
'you' are in sync, you are at peace, purposeful, joyful, but when they
are in conflict you are stressed, unhappy and, well, conflicted. You are being pulled in three directions at once. And 'you' are never in control. After all, you are not yourself.
Why would Gaia have evolved us this way, when it seems to be a recipe for unhappiness, even paralysis?
Let's consider two people, the composite 'yous' of (a) an indigenous and (b) a modern culture:
- U1 is the composite 'you' that might emerge in a natural, indigenous culture
- U2 is the composite 'you' that emerges in highly stressed cultures like our modern civilization
U1 learns what to eat, what to feel, who to love and make love with by reconciling
what her body tells her to do with what she observes others doing.
Individual choice is respected, so any conflicts are resolved quickly
and simply in favour of the body's instructions. In rare cases where
the conflict is serious and irreconcilable, when the culture simply
cannot accept an individual's choices, the individual will choose to
leave the community, or be forced out. U1's instincts are finely honed,
listened to and trusted. Instinctive judgement is complementary to that
of the body and society, and unchallenged. This way of unconflicted living is the
way, I think, 'prehistoric' humans lived and all
non-human creatures live. It is a way of living that has evolved
because it works, except in situations of extreme stress:
overpopulation, resource scarcity and exhaustion, environmental
(habitat) destruction.
U2, by contrast, lives in such a state of constant and extreme stress. Her body and
instincts cannot adapt themselves to these unnatural scarcities. Her
body, in a constant state of trying to cope with stresses that her
'fight or flight' responses are no longer adapted to, begins to wear
down due to the relentless hyperactivity of stress response chemistry
that is, in U1 cultures, only briefly activated. She falls victim to chronic
physical and mental diseases unknown in U1 cultures. She is forbidden
by a brutal and intrusive, controlling culture to do what her body and
instincts tell her to do, and punished severely if she defies that
culture, through incarceration, physical abuse, deprivation, theft of
her essential needs by the culture, and psychological opprobrium by
others in the culture. She begins to hate her body and distrust her
instincts. She becomes unhappy and self-loathing, inconsolably
conflicted. She becomes chronically physically and mentally ill.
This happens because, in cases of extreme stress, Gaia's solution is to
make the society so unhappy it acts, extremely, within itself, to
mitigate and eliminate the cause of the stress. In natural societies
facing such stress, birth rate plunges, and, in extreme cases, the
strongest in the society hoard resources from the rest so at least some
will survive the stressful situation. If that isn't enough, they eat
their young. Once the population and resources are again in
balance, the stress reactions abate and a U2 culture becomes again a U1
culture.
Modern human U2 civilization has now been around for about 30,000
years, and we are taught that this is the only way to live, the only
way we have ever lived. We are taught the comforting and outrageous lie
that U1 cultures were somehow barbaric and desperate, unhealthy and
terrifying and 'red in tooth and claw'. We have forgotten that U2 states are
only supposed to be temporary. Well-intentioned, we have perpetuated
this U2 state, and we continue to deny its utter unsustainability. Our
third, cultural 'yous' have, in the process, become more pervasive, more controlling,
more ruthless, and more violent with each passing century. Gaia is now,
reluctantly, giving up waiting for us to rectify our own behaviour and
is now taking things into her own hands. What is left of our
instincts knows that this will not be pleasant, and this knowledge is
adding even more to our unbearable stress.
So if you are, in your heart, anxious, unhappy, and conflicted, it is not surprising.
It is easy to say that we should learn to be self-aware, self-knowing,
humble, that we should keep our sense of humour and laugh at the
impossibility of resolving these conflicts. That we should pay
attention to our bodies and our senses and our instincts and trust
them, accommodate them, understand the truths about ourselves that they
teach us. We are all so busy
struggling with the consequences of these conflicts and stresses that
it is hard to get above them, to focus on the causes.
As hard as it is to do, we should strive to create the time and space to be at peace with ourselves.
To love our conflicted, absurd selves, as they try impossibly to adapt
to a situation that is dreadful, ghastly, not long for this world. What
our three selves try to get us to do cannot be reconciled, but neither
can any of these selves be subverted. So we have to know
our selves well enough to resolve the conflicts between them, and to
make some courageous, and probably unpopular, decisions. We must learn
to define ourselves less in relation to others and more in terms of
what makes us uniquely us, if we can rediscover, or discover for the
first time, who that is.
Not in order to be nobody-but-ourselves -- it is far too late for that.
Just to be happy.
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12:07:18 AM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
