Humans are naturally (and usually) inclined to take the easy way, go for pleasure and avoid pain. In the wild this bio-hoodwink usually works out well. Human culture has been driven by this primary instinctive drive shared by all animals, from ants to duck to dogs to people. Consider the human highway on the left and the ant highway on the right (photo left). Both species are just trying to make life easier and more efficient. As I pointed out in Ants are Us, the similarities are striking.

Over time (100,000 years +/-) this drive has evolved modern civilization to its present condition through the development of tools and materials to make life easier… more comfortable, secure, and to fatten up whenever possible; who knows when the next famine is coming? That seals feels it has to eat its fill while it can (photo right). The human man is not really any different; his biology does not know the supper markets are always overflowing with food, nor the danger of long term overeating ⁽¹⁾.

So, while we are totally natural in how we live (pursue pleasure, avoid pain), we are not living under the wild conditions for which our instincts evolved over millions of years to live. The instinct to make living easier combined with the cognitive and manual ability to succeed has led us to an unbalance situation. We are increasingly faced with having too much of a good thing. Naturally, letting go of our ‘good thing’ is not easy, and so we remain bogged down in difficulty ⁽²⁾.

Any species that evolves capabilities which bring it beyond essential counterbalancing forces will either evolve in ways that bring it back in balance, or it goes extinct. Of course, external conditions can also change quickly to a degree that brings it lethally out of balance (e.g., the comet and the dinosaurs, the dodo bird and humans).

In my view, we are simply responding to life naturally and like all other creatures, we do so in overall ignorance of the consequences. Like all other life forms, we react to circumstance, and adapt accordingly. The unusual and ironic thing about humans is that human knowledge is a major source of our ignorance. Other animals are just ‘dumb’ and ignorant; we are smart and ignorant. Or as chapter 18 says, when cleverness emerges there is great hypocrisy.

⁽¹⁾ I’ve really noticed the biology as I’ve aged. Toward my late 20’s I found myself gaining weight ‘naturally’. My diet was not really changing, my biology was. When I quit smoking, my weight really shot up. I suppose I was replacing the pleasures from tobacco addiction with pleasure from food. As Buddha’s Second Truth points out, if I had continued to follow pleasure’s bait, the result would be pain—I wound be seriously overweight.

We burn fewer calories as we age. This slow-down prepares us, in the wild, for becoming increasingly less agile in hunting and gathering, and less able to recover from injury. Biology is oblivious to civilized conditions where rich and abundant food is always available, especially now in modern economies.

Interestingly, it took me about 10 years to unlearn the ‘eat today for who knows what lies ahead’ approach to life that years of living abroad in developing countries ingrained in me. It took me that long to psychologically settling down enough to know food was always at hand. It took me even longer to know I needed to rein in pleasure’s drive. Though I understood (in theory) that ‘short term pleasure attracts long term pain‘, it took real time to begin to actually understand and put that into practice.

⁽²⁾ Here are a few passages from Chapter 63 that speaks to the obvious difficulty we face.

Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult;
make something big by starting with it when small.

Difficult things in the world must needs have their beginnings in the easy;
big things must needs have their beginnings in the small.

Therefore, even the sage treats some things as difficult.
That is why in the end no difficulties can get the better of him.

King Sahura c.2487-2475 B.C.E.

This morning lightning struck. I got a great ideal for a book. Even so, it is a book I’ll never write. Still, I have a provocative working title, Why Man Is King, or perhaps, Why Man is King, is God. I’m not even keen on writing a post addressing this, or at least addressing all of ‘this’. As it turns out, the end of the book would dovetail right into a recent post Ant Are Us, so I just have to say something, otherwise this will haunt me for the rest of the day.

Up until now, civilization has done everything possible to put Man at the top, and Woman at the bottom of culture’s hierarchical structure. I always attributed this to simple social zoology where the ‘alpha male’ heads the group. That may still be a major reason for the main origins of human cultural biases. However, I realized another source as I was pondering the dynamics of male-female relationships… what keeps them either working or leads to their demise.

The Venus of Willendorf c. 22,000 B.C.E.

The devils in the details, and that’s what I’d have to delve into and lay out clearly to make the full case. So, I’ll just leave that thread hanging… for now anyway. The connection to Ant Are Us relates to how civilization’s cultures develop these biased modes in the first place. No one is actively creating them, although populations actively support them for generations… until circumstance shift. Societies, of men, mice or ants, evolve in deeply similar ways. Ah yes, another improvable subject of one more book I’m not going to write.

If the connections in the Ant Are Us post rang an intuitive bell of truth for you, I guess this post should also stand up pretty well. So, just take that intuitive sense of the source of what makes us tick culture-wise and picture the unimaginable changes that lie ahead for us now that the age of electricity is rolling along full steam ahead (to use a pre electric-age idiom). I’ll lay out some more connections to help fill in the gaps.

A post agricultural-revolution world

Besides the ‘alpha-male’ source spring for culture’s idiosyncrasies was the practical necessity of maintaining social harmony in a post agricultural-revolution world. With the advent of agriculture, large populations of less intimately connected people were pulled together to make the new system work. Gone was the deep life-long bonding between individuals of the small hunter-gatherer group. That was just asking for trouble within the group (internecine feuds).

Mother and baby

This is where a paradigm and its traditions really help stabilize society. It gives less well-connected individuals at least an illusion of connection, e.g., share the same music, food, dress, religion, etc. The most stabilizing paradigm is that which holds family together. Family stability is the bedrock of culture and civilization as a whole. Lose that, and it becomes every man and woman for them self. Chaos! So what paradigm and its traditions will do the job?

This is getting more involved than I thought, but press on lightly I will. Answering what paradigm most effectively holds culture together requires me returning to my original morning musings: What keeps the dynamics of male-female relationships either working or leads to their demise. Oh well, here goes.

When a woman feels she ‘owns’ her man lock stock and barrel she is more likely to roam, innately on the look out for another fitness father prospect. The same applies to when a man feels he ‘owns’ his woman.  As the female is the cornerstone of primate nesting practice, culture (especially post agricultural revolution) inevitably evolved the paradigm that favors keeping woman in the lower, less mobile position. This, along with the ‘alpha-male’ deal, is why man is king. The Venus of Willendorf figurine (above) hints that things were a bit different during the hunter-gather times. Now this scenario rests on the premise that we are not truly, innately monogamous. No truly hierarchical animal ⁽¹⁾, ape or otherwise, is monogamous (to my knowledge anyway). The two, hierarchy and monogamy are a little like oil and water; they are not mutually supportive.  There’s more to it, naturally. And even if I’m wrong about the hierarchy / monogamy part, the overall story is the same, so on with the story…

Industrialization and the birth of the electric-age

The advent of industrialization and modern, market economies made this Man is King practice increasingly obsolete. This shift made the ‘women’s lib’ and the other social movements over the last century inevitable. So here we are now, but where is that?  Who knows? All I am certain about is that the electric-age is perhaps the most profound change in circumstance to visit humanity since the harnessing of fire, or if not that, the agricultural revolution. Considering how circumstances bring us to maturity in the macro sense of that process, it is easy to imagine how profoundly up in the air everything is once again, paradigm-wise. The past being our only guide pretty much means we have no idea what we are doing. We are like children, born into a new world, stumbling along and feeling our way forward. Who knows, there may be a time when culture may actually embrace the Taoist paradigm / worldview. No, I won’t be holding my breath!

That is the ‘bones’ of it. There is a lot of supporting empirical stuff I won’t go into. Why not flesh it out completely, you may ask, even if it ended up being a book. With enough charts, supporting scientific data, example, interviews, and such it could even be a college course! What harm is there in that?  No harm, of course, but no fun either.  The fun for me lies in the adventure of discovery that occurs as I look around at life with this symptom’s point of view. Interesting stuff continually pops up. Nailing down all the details that a book requires is just tedious, unnecessary work—unnecessary because I feel no compelling reason to do it.

In the end is the fact that we mostly only see what we wish to see. So much of what I observe ‘out there’ is really just that, out there in the open for anyone to see. I learned a while ago not to try to show someone something they didn’t want to see. Of course, that took me a long time to see. Why? It was not what I wanted to see. Oh, the desires we have and the blind spots they produce.

Alpha-male

Well, there’s my post, for what it’s worth. I feel I’ve only scratched the surface. But hey, it won’t be haunting me for the rest of the day anyway.

⁽¹⁾ For more details on primate behavior, see Social Structure. My hypothesis rests on what constitutes a truly hierarchical animal. The nature of life is never a clear cut, in my view. Shadowy and indistinct patterns and possibilities have always landed me where I wanted to be. Honestly, I’m happy if I’m only 51% right, and even then, to think that one does not know is best!

If I were a true believer in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world view I might even be susceptible to the ‘end of times’ stories these prophets preach. Being a Taoist lets me off the hook for the most part; any part that remains ‘on the hook’ is nicely assuaged by Buddha’s Truths.

I suspect this sometimes apocalyptic sense of life is one of the deepest we humans feel. I see it manifested in various ways, and while not as literal the “May 21″ end of the time story, they are nevertheless common. The stock market crashes foretell the end of the economy as we know it; extinction of species and global warming foretells the end of the planet as we know it.

These recurring stories, along with the recent Gulf oil spill and the nuclear disaster in Japan, all trigger cataclysmic perceptions in people far removed in time and space from actual events (or non-events as in the case of Armageddon-like stories).

Believers in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world view and the Western view in general, may be especially vulnerable to apocalyptic scenarios. The Western model of creation is a one-time event. The big-bang (or God created the world in seven days) beginning is over, when is the end? It’s not surprising that really true Believes get anxious from time to time. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic end of life scenario with its heaven or hell finality is also symptomatic of the Western one-shot creation model.

Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, with their cyclic view of reality, offer those who share those beliefs a safer and saner alternative, I have to say. “Don’t freak out, you can redo life over better next time” works for the Buddhist and Hindu. For a true Taoist, life, death, beginning and end produce each other. This mysterious sameness offers a continuum of existence—immortality may be too strong a word (and perhaps Catholics would call that purgatory).

What accounts for this apocalyptic sense all humans appear to share? I imagine knowledge of our own death lies at the heart of it. The first truly long term reality of which we were aware must have been death. Other species mourn the loss of companions (pair-bond or herd), but humans have acquired an objective memory of this. We know there is an apparent END to every BEGINNING, which makes life a much more serious affair. Knowing this, we could no longer merrily merely hunt and gather our days away. We realized we had to prepare, and cognitively applied this fearsome model to many things we do.

Given all this, it is odd how we fail to take action until after the fact, like preparing adequately for earthquakes or our own health. Yet, we speed up through the intersection so as not to lose the yellow light. Perhaps we feel the former “won’t happen to us”, and in the latter we see immanent loss. Well of course! Fear rules, but only when we feel it. Of course, fear always lurks beneath the surface. Improperly placed, our fear asset is wasted. Yes, fear is a valuable survival asset, and wasting it has consequences—namely, when the people lack a proper sense of awe, then some awful visitation will descend upon them.

Our choices for what to look for in a leader runs the gamut, as this excerpt from the Science News’ article puts it:

“There is an interesting trade-off here, which certainly applies to humans and maybe elephants as well,” van Vugt says. “The group might want a young, fit and aggressive leader to defend the group — the Schwarzenegger type — but at the same time might want an older, more experienced leader — the Merkel type — to make an accurate assessment of the dangers in the situation.”

Though the article doesn’t say so explicitly, it infers that the elder matriarchs hold sway in the herd. Up until recently we were more like elephants in our choices for whom to trust more to know the score. The elders knew where the water holes where in times of drought, where the game was, etc., in our hunter-gatherer days. They had experienced the ebb and flow of life longer, enabling them a better view of the big picture.

Agriculture turned the tide

Then, with the advent of agriculture (c. 10,000 b.c.e.) we began shifting away from our age-old nomadic life style where elder knowledge was the more valued asset. Our new settled life style gave the edge to “young, fit and aggressive” intelligence more suited to ‘progress’: first in agricultural, then industrial, now in technological. Ever since then, know-how, over know-why-when-where, has become the more esteemed—especially in the last few centuries!

By valuing intelligence over wisdom we are turning into a culture of idiot savants, to some extent. This trends from one end of expertise (science and technology) to the other (sports and arts), and everything in between, whether lawyers, doctors or assembly line workers, to name a few. Everyone today has a more or less specialize niche to fill. Specialization is the way modern economies and life function. The principle danger in this approach is an increasing focus on short term singular gains⁽¹⁾. Unlike elephants, we are effectively choosing the “young, fit and aggressive” to lead the way. This makes the admonition, ‘woe to him who willfully innovates while ignorant of the constant‘, so much more relevant now than when it was first writing down some 2500 years ago.

In time the tide will turn again

For decades I wondered how our species would ever get out of the overall ‘jam’ we find ourselves in. I could only imagine we would evolve in some discrete way to bring us more into balance with nature. Our path, born of our desire for ever increasing ‘progress’ has got to be a dead end, in my view. Upon learning more thoroughly about the conditions required for genetic evolution (bottle-neck, etc.) made that scenario most unlikely. That got me to look even more deeply.

About a decade ago, it occurred to me that humanity’s salvation lies in the fact that the median age of the population is steadily increasing (see, “There may be a silver lining” at the bottom of this post on Ethics). In another century or so people will be living far longer. Life is a learning process; the longer you are alive, the better your chances of learning something significant. It’s true for elephants; it’s true for us. Of course that’s no guarantee. While circumstances are the teacher, how much is learned all comes down to the quality of the student. Nevertheless, the odds improve overall.

Then also, as living standards rise worldwide, the birth rate declines. Altogether, this means the global median age is bound to rise even more rapidly. Today the median age in USA is about 37. When the Declaration of Independence was signed two centuries ago the median age was just 16, not much different from that at the time of Christ. Interestingly much of Africa is now at this level, but bolstered by advances in medicine and public health that should change rapidly.

It there a silver lining or not?

Surprisingly (to me anyway), whenever I mention this silver lining idea, people remain unconvinced. I ask them if they are not wiser now in their youth. Almost without exception, they will say yes, and yet don’t seem able to extend that process, in principle, to the humanity as a whole. That odd disconnect stumps me a little. Maybe this is symptomatic of the ego: While we know we become wiser in time, we doubt others do.

Of course, it is doubtful that many will notice any overall transition of humanity to the maturing effects of an increasing median age. It takes some wisdom to value, look for and recognize wisdom. This whole shift will likely come gradually in a “two steps forward and one step backwards” process. The fact that the “young, fit and aggressive” are currently leading the way makes it even harder to notice. Then also, we are very early into this trend. After all, the median age hadn’t changed much at all from the time of Christ up until a few hundred years ago with the advent of better sanitation and medical breakthroughs.

It is somewhat ironic that our species’ salvation will likely come about through our species’ sins. Meaning that only through scientific and technological advances can we increase our lifespan enough to find the wisdom to not willfully innovate while ignorant of the constant. Rather than endlessly pursue ‘progress’, we’ll know it is better to have stopped in time. Elephants need only reach 60; being a more ‘intelligent’ species, we may need to reach twice that or more before we can do this. Perhaps we’ll even be able to…

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,
Will find relish in their food,
And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode,
And happy in the way they live.

⁽¹⁾ Short term gains followed by long term pains. I find the principle at work everywhere. See, The Spirit of Yoga, Chairs: One of Our Biggest Mistake, Fear Is The Bottom Line

I’ll post a large portion of the article now in case the link fails to work at some point. I don’t have much to add otherwise (surprise, surprise). Although at the bottom I’ll include a reply to a comment made on the article Mr. Guitchounts who specializes in neuroscience which I suppose accounts his championing of human cognitive prowess.

Give it up for in-laws. Those much-maligned meddlers helped spur an ancient social revolution that propelled human groups from savannas to cities, a new study suggests.

That conclusion stems from an analysis of genealogical and marital data indicating that, among modern hunter-gatherers, monogamous sexual unions between men and women from neighboring groups create networks of in-laws that spawn widespread cooperation and cultural learning, says a team led by anthropologist Kim Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe. Social groups organized in this way distinguish humans from other primates, Hill and his colleagues propose in the March 11 Science.

“Alliances between foraging groups are facilitated because unrelated males all associate with the same female, who may be their daughter, sister, wife, mother or daughter-in-law,” Hill says. “By friendly association with her, males begin to associate with each other.”

A social system of this type, which encourages collaboration among genetically unrelated individuals, originated approximately two million years ago as human ancestors began to hunt and gather foods that youngsters could not obtain for themselves, Hill hypothesizes. In this situation, females would have had an incentive to seek mates willing to stick around and provide food for offspring.

In contrast, female chimps mate with many partners. Males in adjacent chimp groups try to kill each other on sight, making cooperation between communities impossible.

“Differences in social structures, not necessarily cognitive advances, allowed our species to cross the barrier to cumulative cultural evolution,” remarks anthropologist Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In this process, cultural inventions become increasingly complex from one generation to the next.

Three social features characterize hunter-gatherer societies and are unique to humans, the researchers conclude. First, both men and women are as likely to stay in the bands they were born into as to move to new bands to find marriage partners. Second, adult brothers and sisters frequently reside together, along with lots of in-laws. Third, a majority of band members are genetically unrelated.

In a comment published in the same issue of Science, anthropologist Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal argues that this monogamy-based social structure encourages males to circulate freely among bands in which they have kin and in-laws. Cultural innovations and traditions thus spread rapidly and unite bands into larger social units called tribes, Chapais proposes.

Cultural learning among hunter-gatherers led to the rise of agriculture around 10,000 years ago and the ensuing formation of states and complex institutions, Hill hypothesizes.

My response to a comment posted on this research on the Science News website.

Grigori Guitchounts says “This is hardly impressive in terms of importance and scientific credibility.” That’s a bit strong. Sounds like he’s defending human cognitive ability.

We are not that objective when it comes to judging ourselves. We are quite naturally species ego-centric. It’s a shame we can’t see that better than we do. If we did we might improve our own self understanding.

I’ve long suspected that the principle reason for our dominance on the planet was due to our social instincts much more than ‘intelligence’. In that regard, we are more like idiot savants. The blindness of expertise I call it.

This article goes a long way to uncovering the deeper reasons why we’ve ended up where we are today. Sure the brain, the thumb, the upright posture all played a role, but not as profound as the social aspect.

We, like all social species, always have some form of governance. Social species need their ‘alpha male’ (even if that’s the queen bee in a bee hive).

Being a more complicated species than bees, hierarchical governance is multi-layered. Even within our species though, the more ’sophisticated’ the culture/civilization, the more layers. Hunter gather groups have the simplest – no courts, parliaments, congresses, or special interest clubs.

Just as a pyramid needs its base, a social hierarchy (’pyramid’) relies on the support of the governed. To be viable, a government must have the “mandate of heaven”, as the Chinese used to say. Viewed from a symptoms point of view, the particular governing system a society adopts must reflect the inherent needs of that society. Although, I think this tends to be seen the other way around. For example, democracy is usually seen as the ’cause’ of modern progress and freedom. Not so as I see it. Instead, it is a symptom of the kind of governance that is conducive for this current era’s way of life. Democracy is a story about what we love, not about what is. And as we know, love is blind.

Whether a governance system is benevolent or ruthless probably has little to do with whether it is a democracy or not. After all, under our ‘democratic’ system, we had slavery, killed countless Indians, destroyed the environment, and so on. And our ‘free speech’ is dominated by those with the loudest mouth, or the fattest wallets.

In the end, it is all about power. The big powerful dog is the leader of the pack. Civilizations have more sophisticated ways to express power. In a capitalist country like ours, money is the big power brokers, just like religious, socialist, or communist ideologies have been in other lands. Jim Cramer⁽¹⁾, a veteran of Wall Street, had an interesting and insightful observation on this aspect in a recent video interview.

This episode of “Stop Trading, Listen to Cramer!” begins with a short interview with a Russian expert on nuclear power, then Cramer comments. His frustration with the ironic discrepancy with what we say and what we do is palpable. The struggle to accept how things actually are, rather than the myth (story) we want to believe is a fascinating endeavor. Fascinating in part for how difficult it is!

⁽¹⁾ His goal is to help people participate successfully in the stock market, and a capitalist economy. I began experimenting with the stock market during the 2009 crash. I’ve found it to be a most effective way to actually apply and test Taoist theory to real world practice–the Dao of Dow as it were.

Yoga, shakuhachi, tai chi, and the like are all effective expressions of marching forward when there is no road. But they happen over time, the feedback is constant but never grabs you by the balls. The stock market, on the other hand, offers visceral feedback when attempting to apply what is beyond the understanding of all but a very few in the world. Why? Perhaps it is the putting your money where your mouth is. Money is a universal, ancient representation of ’survival’–the more you have, the better your chances of raw survival (though not by any means happiness, of course).

Now I’ll stop and save the rest of this Dao of Dow story for another time.

Jungle church in Malaya

Well, why not! But seriously, this is a question I have not heard asked much… if at all⁽¹⁾ Debates mostly focus on whose God is best, the nature of God, or does God even existence. Asking “why do we believe in God” is more of a zoological approach to this issue. That is the place to begin; after all, we are animals first.

I’ve long see the God idea as an emergent property of our social need for leadership, i.e., ‘alpha male’, the decider. All social primate groups have some individual serving this unifying role. Being a thinking ape, it is natural that we would image the existence of a super-leader in a super-home (heaven). Being social apes, it is also nature that we’d enjoy gathering to share the experience. A recent article in Science News, Connected at church, happy with life, offered some support for the why of it all.

Here are a few excerpts from the article that caught my eye…

Researchers have long noted that religious people report higher levels of happiness and well-being than nonreligious folk. Lim and Putnam offer a rare glimpse, based on telephone surveys of a national sample of 1,915 adults in 2006 and 2007, of how religion improves quality of life. “Our evidence shows that it is not really going to church and listening to sermons or praying that makes people happier, but making church-based friends and building social networks there,” Lim says.

What’s more, spiritual aspects of religion do little to further well-being, the researchers say. Neither survey participants who “personally experience the presence of God” nor those who often “personally feel God’s love in life” report more well-being than people who do not. Volunteers who do and don’t believe in God or heaven with absolute certainty display comparable satisfaction with their lives.

Being on the same wave length enhances the feeling of mutual connection.

One-third of participants who had a strong religious identity and three to five close friends in their congregation reported being “extremely satisfied” with their lives, a figure that rose to nearly 40 percent for those with 11 or more such friends. The researchers defined “extremely satisfied” as a rating of 10 on a life-satisfaction scale ranging from one to 10.

In contrast, one-fifth of churchgoers who had three to five congregational friends but didn’t identify strongly with their faith reported extreme life satisfaction. The same figure applied to nonreligious people whose friends were not part of congregations.

So, the strong the sense of connection between folks, the more satisfied they feel. Sharing a strong religious identity amplifies the sense of connection.

Private religious practices, such as praying and holding religious services at home, also show no link to greater life satisfaction, the new report finds.

Lim emphasizes that, according to survey data, spirituality and theology bolster well-being only for people who build friendships at church.

This shows me that sharing a strong identity is the essential key, not the spirituality and theology per se. Yep, it’s the social connection that does the trick. Common belief in something is the glue, whether its political ideology, sports, food, music, _(you name it)_. However, sharing a strong sense of spirituality is the most personal, like family. Which bring me to another question, why church?

Church provides a deep sense of social connection, as does any place where people meet (market, job, restaurants, bars). A spiritual setting, like church, offers the safest, least judgmental, and non competitive meeting place. The only other setting like this, besides a stable family, was the ancestral hunter gatherer tribe. In those prehistoric times people shared their entire lives, from birth to death, with several dozen people. The exceptionally high level of “socio-emotional” security this offered declined as civilization took over the human experience. We unwittingly traded material comforts and security for emotional comfort and security. Church (and religion in general) is merely a symptoms of this loss, and our effort to compensate as best we can.

Churches (and God) are symptoms of current needs however. There is much archaeological evidence for various forms of spirituality in humanity culture going back tens of thousands of years. Very curiously no other animals appears to rely upon so called “spirituality”. What is the difference between all of them and us? We think! As chapter 71 puts it, To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty. Our ideals, beliefs and myths go a long way to helps us think that we know. The human mind has been overtaken by names and words (language) so extensively that it disconnects us from the immediate moment-to-moment experience-of-being that other animals enjoy. Spirituality simply reflects our attempt to compensate for that.

My final question is, why don’t I attend a nice local church? I simply can’t buy into the ideals, belief and myths. Once, when I was around ten year old, I did believe in God. I don’t recall when or why I dropped that belief. When I was sixteen a friend invited my to his church to meet girls. I did believe in girl, so I went for a few years. Years later, while hitchhiking across the Sahara Dessert I had reached bottom – I felt life absolutely meaningless. I even wished I could be a true believer in something, as many people seemed to me to be. I suppose many who read Centertao will know what I’m referring to. Fortunately the The net of heaven is cast wide. Though the mesh is not fine, yet nothing ever slips through. I’ve also come to realize that ‘true belief’ is a very precarious approach to life which accounts for the passion that often bolsters it.

Following the teaching that uses no words doesn’t offer any concrete belief to share with others in church or anywhere else. Certainly, if I’d been in this survey, I never would have “reported being “extremely satisfied” with my life”. That doesn’t mean I’m not content, however. I suspect that the ability to believe one is “extremely satisfied” is part of the same ability to believe in God. It may not be objectively true, but that doesn’t matter because ‘truth is in the eye of the beholder’. For my part, I compensate for my lack of belief by ’soaking up the moment’. That gives me all the sense of connection I seem to need.

⁽¹⁾ I’ve not heard this question asked, as I recall, except by me. My symptoms point-of-view could not help wonder about that first and foremost.

This and other experiences in Asia over the years gave me intimate insight into the lives of peasants. I was virtually one myself, at least financially speaking. Although I never worked long days in the rice fields, I had settled into what amounted to a peasant life style.

Fast forward about a decade to Sweden. There I settled into an area of Stockholm inhabited by the wealthiest Swedes (the King also lived in that area). I never settled into a Swedish life style though, my more peasant-like one being more comfortable. I couldn’t help notice and compare the lives of the upper class folks I came to know there, with the peasants I had lived among in Asia. One thing stood out like a sore thumb: these wealthy folks seemed no happier than poor Thai peasants. Odd to say, if anything, they even seemed a bit less so.

Looking back, I understand it better. Living creatures (including us) live out their days struggling against the inevitable (i.e., the entropic path in Buddha’s First Truth”…birth, growth, decay and death” ). The instinct to struggle (the survival instinct) is built into life’s DHA. In the case of peasants, the struggle instinct is fully engaged in the simple operation of basic survival. Not so for wealthier folk. On what does a rich person’s struggle instinct struggle? It certainly isn’t engaged in practical down-to-earth survival!

On the other side of this struggle instinct, in life’s equation, is the innate drive to seek ‘happiness’. I’ll call that the contentment instinct. Like the ‘fight or flight’ equation, each must find balance between struggle and contentment. On one hand we stir, move forward and work; on the other, we are still, return and rest. So far so good. When our struggle instinct engages itself in down-to-earth challenges, it is operating closer to the hunter gatherer circumstances of its evolution.

Wealth (i.e., more is better) promises us an escape from nitty-gritty challenges. Surly then we can live struggle-free, content in comfort and security. Actual success in achieving ‘more and more’ (we call it progress) has unintended consequences: What, pray tell, will one’s struggle instinct strive for then? Changing circumstances doesn’t delete DNA. The acquisition of wealth doesn’t neutralize the struggle instinct. Oops. Woe to him who willfully innovates while ignorant of the constant.

The striking thing I remember from Sweden was how wealthy folk worried about trivial things, like the selling of South African grapefruit in Sweden, while Thai peasants worry about practical challenges like the price of lard with which to cook. It appears that being spared from struggling on practical basics can easily lower overall contentment and happiness. Actual wealth delivers profoundly less than it promises. This more-is-better illusion is one of nature’s most potent hoodwinks. Instinct overrides reason, and we take the bait even though we think that we know that ‘money doesn’t bring happiness’⁽²⁾. As Christ said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God“. So, be aware and beware!

⁽¹⁾ I had planned to settle down in Thailand. When money ran really low I went off to Vietnam to work and save money. The plan was to return with a grubstake and upgrade the bakery. That plan changed, but that’s another story. Suffice to say, at that tender age I lacked the experience to know that plans are little more than visions based on past experience. Life, on the other hand, flows out moment to moment into what is called indistinct and shadowy.

⁽²⁾ Wealth is relative! If you are starving and you find food, you are profoundly wealthier, at least until your food runs out. The Thai peasants were wealthy relative to the many folks I saw in India, Ethiopia, Niger, for example. A truer definition of wealth is found in the Tao Te Ching’s, He who knows contentment is rich, or as Henry David Thoreau put it, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone”. From this standpoint, Mother Theresa’s view that America was ‘poorer’ than India holds more water. Mind you, it is not that people in India don’t want to be rich; they do. And when they succeed, they will be as ‘poor’ as us.

By the way, among other things, wealth ‘frees’ me to struggle at writing down as coherently as possible what I see. By the same token, wealth ‘frees’ you to struggle to see if there is anything coherent, even useful, in what I say. The struggle continues and we’re happy.

Modern hunting and gathering

It has been my habit for decades to eat nothing much until late afternoon. That  goes against the standard ‘breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ rule, especially seeing how I get up at 7am. Sure this may be a little stressful to my body, but that turns out to be a good thing. As with most everything, it isn’t the what that matters, it is the how much that ‘breaks the camels back’.

Consider this excerpt from Anti-aging: A little stress may keep cells youthful,  a recent article in Science News.

“The study focused on individual cells, but for whole organisms the finding could shed light on a link between stress and life span. “A little bit of stress can actually prolong life,” says molecular biologist Richard Morimoto of Northwestern, a study coauthor. Mild stress activates the heat shock response but does not harm the cells, he adds.

One mild stress that can activate the heat-shock response is a calorie-restricted diet, which has been shown to extend the life of all species tested so far, including mice and dogs. Calorie-restricted diets increase the levels of Sirtuin 1, or SIRT1, an aging-related protein. “

Ancient hunting & gathering

Nature, in her wisdom, makes hunger her main tool of progress. What is desire, but imagined hungers. I’ve found that keeping myself on the hungry side helps focus my priorities. I’m less likely to get drawn in by secondary hungers  (desire, lust, hope, etc.) when I feeling primary hunger.  Not being so drawn in to those, I can best accomplish my private end.

The main difficulty I face living a civilized life is the ready access to food. All I need do is open the fridge to feed hunger. Being able to satiate it so quickly paves the way for those secondary hungers (desire, lust, hope, etc.) to rush in and fill the void. Many millennia ago our ancestors in the wild had no such void to fill. Like wild animals the world over, their hunger was fully utilized in the immediate and ongoing daily pursuit of food.  Ah, those were the days! Although, medical care was pretty dismal back then. And so it is, something lost, something gained.

Keeping mindful of this tendency is invaluable. Conscientiously done, life turns out much better than otherwise I find. For me, chapter 14 speaks to this:

Hold fast to the way of antiquity
In order to keep in control the realm of today.
The ability to know the beginning of antiquity
Is called the thread running through the way.

So, what about the future. Shouldn’t we look ahead for potential opportunity or dangers which lie there? Actually, the real opportunities and dangers are found in the present. Being here in the moment is the best way to take advantage of opportunity and avoid danger. The future actually does take care of itself when I am fully engaging in the present. For me, chapter 64 speak to this perfectly:

It is easy to maintain a situation while it is still secure;
It is easy to deal with a situation before symptoms develop;
It is easy to break a thing when it is yet britle;
It is easy to dissolve a thing while it is yet minute.
Deal with a thing while it is still nothing;
Keep a thing in order before disorder sets in.

Looking out to the future actually robs from the present, and besides:

Foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way, and the beginning of folly.

Speaking of foreknowledge, I tried my hand at foretelling it for awhile. In the 70’s I learned to read palms, cast horoscopes, do the I-ching, Tarot cards and a few other things. The most fascinating part of it was how people reacted to me telling them their past, present and future. Those that had faith from the start in what I was doing not only bought every word, but often amplified it. They believed!

Those who didn’t have faith from the start were less than convinced and neutral at best. It only went to show how our expectations play a huge role in how and what we see. Anything that seems to support our expectations reinforces them, and anything that doesn’t we usually discount heavily or ignore.