Friday, October 07, 2011
"Ego" by Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft
Ego
by Peter Baumann and Michael W. Taft (found on SoundsTrue website)
The Fall of the Twin Towers and the Rise of an Enlightened Humanity
Albert Einstein wrote of the human condition:
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Trapped in a complex web of emotion and thought, we understand ourselves as a cluster of identifications with race, nationality, religion, political beliefs, age, gender, and profession. Alone, these concepts would be ephemeral, but they are underpinned by knee-jerk emotional reactions, intense pleasure-and-pain conditioning in our bodies that resists any change or insight. Cobbled together, these concepts lock us in a sense of permanence and isolation, disconnected from the visceral common sense that would tell us at every moment just how wrong we are in our daily apprehension of reality.
Evolution acting through the mechanism of natural selection created the emotions that motivate and direct our behavior, as well as the imagination we use to model possible outcomes for that behavior. Over millions of years, these developed in our animal and proto-human ancestors into an extremely potent combination. As a system, our thoughts and feelings have ratcheted our species up the escalator from harsh, brutal survival in the dirt to the comfort, cleanliness, and convenience of sipping tea on a transcontinental flight.
And yet, like any technology—our body/brain system represents a highly advanced biological technology—there is almost as much of a downside as there is an upside. The same imagination that allows us to build jet airliners can dream up a plan to crash them into skyscrapers full of people. Our religious feelings motivate us to feed and clothe the needy, or to kill nonbelievers. The same empathic emotions that allow us to care for our families and children can motivate us to annihilate anyone we think threatens our loved ones. This downside doesn’t just drive international terrorists or even the murderer down the block. It drives the anxiety, depression, and alienation that plague us today.
Given that our bodies and brains, and therefore our thoughts and feelings, are the result of evolution, it is likely that evolution will also adapt in us a trait or capacity that provides a way out. Our genetic makeup is not written in stone, and is constantly changing. And although Einstein talks about taking individual responsibility to free ourselves from this prison—he was, after all, writing this quote in a letter to a rabbi—it may turn out not to be a personal matter at all. Perhaps it is more an issue of humanity, as a species, slowly marching toward an escape hatch.
The evolution of our species has not come to an end. Human beings are not a finished product, but instead a perpetually unfinished process, a moving target, and our current state, the human condition, is not the final word on the subject. Humanity is in motion as the wave of evolution continues to push us forward. The expansion of awareness that originally allowed us to become conscious of our thoughts and feelings is still under way. The rise in brainpower has not only created an explosion of skills—inventing tools, language, medicine, technology, civilization—it has at many times during the last two thousand years allowed some random outliers to glimpse something shocking: that who we think we are—our mental self- concept, or ego—is not actually what we are. Our self-concept is a symbol, an idea like any other. As evolution stumbles forward in its blind march of accidental brilliance, this radical insight that was once the province of a special few will slowly become the normal viewpoint: nothing special. The unfolding of the physical universe, the laws of nature, and evolution of life are generating the expanded perspective that will allow humanity to make the biggest prison break of all time—escaping the prison of ourselves.
