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Introduction

For the purposes of this book, there are only two chapters in the story of mankind. The first chapter unfolded like everything else in the natural world that defined the nature of the evolving human species. That was the environment in which homo sapiens appeared, took hold, then flourished—at-one with Nature. These ancestral pre-humans and humans survived on the land in small groups intimately connected by the already ingrained human need for the feelings of safety and belonging provided by the presence of others.

One of the more potent of evolution’s special gifts to humanity—our gift of language—made possible the second chapter in the life of our species. Before language, both humans and animals had always lived in the moment, focused on what is. Once humans had language, they eventually developed an unnatural relationship with the future. Previously, people had concerned themselves only with the immediate future. After language, we became concerned about the long-term future, even eternity.

Once people were able to talk about the future, they quite naturally began to worry about it. They became afraid of it—afraid of what would happen, afraid they wouldn’t be safe in a future yet unknown. Inevitably, they began to use language to create ways to guarantee safety in the future. They learned to make plans, then to organize and carry them out. Thinking they had control of their fate, they began living for the future, instead of in the moment. Ever since then mankind has focused on what should be, not on what is.

These ancient people had no way of knowing they were unwittingly making a world-changing error, by flirting with the concept of the future. Nor did they realize that every generation after them would suffer, because of it. It felt so natural, at the time, that there was nothing to stop them, or the generations that followed, from carrying that line of thinking to the nth degree…

The result is the modern world in which we live, a world quite separated from the natural world that once cradled humanity. We now live in a world of technology, comforts, and excess, in which we see our possibilities as limited only by our imaginations. We even envision ourselves one-day inhabiting the far reaches of the universe.

In the course of this drastic change, our “chapter two” has become the story of how we lost our connection to our human nature—the emotional and spiritual core that makes us human. We now live in an artificial world of physical and material comforts that wealth provides. Born into this Teflon world, virtually none of us realize that, before chapter two, human life was replete with spiritual wealth—the inherent comfort that is missing in our world, today. It is the comfort that comes from the love people experience when depending on each other for survival. Just as friction makes fire, interdependence breeds the deeply threaded love of sisterhoods and brotherhoods—the spiritual wealth that satisfies the hunger of our souls.

For thousands of years, modern humans have lived without this key human comfort, whose absence is making our lives increasingly strained. Nearly all of us are aware—some chronically—of our personal anxieties about the future, guilt about the conduct of our lives, resentment over any number of lacks, injustices, real or imagined slights, boredom, hopelessness, intermittent depression… All of it. At the bottom of that pile of modern woes lies the emotional isolation that causes it all, the lack of love, lack of real intimacy with others, the lack of freedom to express how we really feel, the necessity of repressing our real desires. All of this we tolerate in our modern world, which demands compliance, rather than valuing us as the beings that we are.

Modern life is not fit for humans. Modern life, in fact, is a desert for the soul. For thousands of years, humankind has been stranded in this desert, yet, the “mothballed” soul of every human has remained intact. That is the reason I believe there is a way for us, once again, to feel and behave as the natural humans we are.

This book has been written to break that impasse, and end human blindness to the suffering that institutional life inflicts upon us all. Understanding that the way out of the desert is a way to be, not a set of goals or plans, is all it takes to start the process. Once we understand, we can hear the soul’s message, again—a message that, once heard, cannot be stilled.

Beneath the umbrella of that understanding, people will gravitate together, drawn by an irrepressible hankering for the intimate, interdependent lives all humans once took for granted. That’s how we’ll find the people with whom to make real homes, again. Though our lifetimes aren’t long enough for us to see humankind’s complete return to the natural human way of life, rest assured the process will not cease, once started. Too many people will understand, by then, that no human can enjoy spiritual wealth, nor can any species long survive, if its members are spiritually imprisoned by force of man-made laws that deny them access to their innate emotional intelligence. Darwin discovered that we descended from social primates, but that has traditionally been interpreted as applying only to our physical nature. I am saying that it applies to our emotional nature, as well. Indeed, only by being true to our emotional nature can we find contentment.

The Coronavirus pandemic came upon us after this book had gone to press, but I was able to add the following Coda: “The Coronavirus Crisis—A Lesson on Spiritual Connection” discusses how our reactions to crises, particularly this one, shed spiritual light on the nature of our circumstances.

“Comparing Realities,” is a table near the end of the book, which brings the entire thesis of this book into sharp focus with clear, concise language. Each row covers a different category of human needs and shows how they fare in natural human life vs. modern institutional life. The glossary, also near the end, clarifies my usage of terms. A brief, but comprehensive statement of what this book is about can be found at the end, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled How Would Human Life Organize Itself, if People were Free to be True to How they Feel?

Chapter One

There is a Message in Emotional Pain

How Civilization Destroys Happiness

Just by doing what they feel like doing, individual humans, elephants, and fireflies, alike, unknowingly serve and perpetuate the life of their species. Like them, no lion, or whale, or worm in the ground ever knows that the volition preceding its every action was organically programmed over eons, through trial-and-error, by evolution.

Today, no king on a throne, no modern serf toiling in a cubicle, no druggie shooting up in an alley realizes that the powerful needs and desires that drive him are, in fact, a damaged form of that same primordial heritage—the civilized remnants of evolution’s organic programming. Yet that programming—in the original form, which still exists in Nature—is the map of life on earth. In the natural world—the real world where mastodons, dinosaurs, then, homo sapiens once thrived—that powerful programming spurred every living being to love doing the things that best helped its species to flourish.

So powerful, so embedded in the architecture of natural life is this emotional programming of living beings that I call it the Law of Life:

To serve life, do things that feel good, and avoid doing things that result in emotional pain.

Doing what feels good, not what hurts, is the one thing that makes sense to every living being. So, the “Law of Life” works flawlessly—in the natural world. This doesn’t mean suffering is nonexistent in Nature. Rather, it underscores the fact that, in Nature, individuals unfailingly react to every circumstance in a way that maximizes pleasure. According to the Law of Life, the behaviors of individuals in Nature will always be the ones that minimize pain, thus optimize the likelihood that their species will flourish.

The Law of Life applies to civilized humans, as much as it once did to pre-humans and the earliest humans. But we modern humans left the natural world and built our own institutional one—an error that has placed us on the “wrong side” of the Law of Life. We serve another master. Indeed, as subjects of legal systems, we regularly defy the Law of Life, for the sake of our own survival, within the modern paradigm. Consequently, we suffer in numerous ways. In order to make a living, workers go to jobs they hate. Wives remain in meaningless, even abusive relationships, out of fear they couldn’t support themselves and their children. People endure endless lines of traffic, to get to work.

When we experience pain, as in the examples above, it’s because our souls are sending us an alert message—a serious warning that is always the same: “You are not serving life!” This suffering is not due to any fault of our own. We didn’t choose to disobey the Law of Life. We disobey it, because we were born into civilized cultures, where we’re not free to honor it.

Even the people who invented civil rule weren’t at fault. Their collective error was inevitable, given that evolution had gifted us with languaged minds. Our unique linguistic skills enabled humans to do something that no previous being on earth could do—to create our own social order and put aside the natural social order that evolution built into us.

When humans imposed moral edicts, believing they could make life better, the suffering that resulted from breaking the Law of Life began immediately. But, because people didn’t know about Nature’s law, they interpreted the suffering as being caused by mankind’s sinful nature. Their evidence for this was the fact that people seemed incapable of faithfully following all the rules. No one measured up. People seemed possessed with the desire to misbehave. What in-fact possesses us is our inborn desire to obey the Law of Life. But, as a result of our belief in civil law, we see ourselves as sinners, when we “slip,” by answering that inner voice—never realizing that such “sins” are natural acts inspired by our inborn desire to take care of life.

Since the moment humans began judging themselves as sinful, for transgressing in this way, everything humanity has organized and controlled has worked against our happiness and against the ultimate survival of our species. If we are ever again to experience the contentment of sisterhood and brotherhood that our kind once took for granted, and if our species is to survive this six-thousand-year-old episode of self-imposed punishment, the time must come when we stop chastising people for obeying the Law of Life, and start honoring each other when we behave like normal humans.

The emotional suffering our predecessors so innocently caused is painful, but our languaged minds have found a remarkably direct way to survive it. They manage the pain simply by doubling down on their belief in civilization. They believe civil rule can deliver the future it promises, and they keep believing it without evidence, historical or otherwise, to support it.

Over thousands of years of human life, history has chronicled the rise and fall of many civilizations. It’s a well-recognized, thus predictable pattern. Yet, when a system of civil rule fails, we humans take no message from the chaos inherent to these failures, or from the human suffering that heralds them. The message of the suffering is lost on humanity. It carries no weight, relative to our tenacious belief that we will “get it right” the next time.

So, we continue to ignore the consequences of not honoring the Law of Life, taking immense comfort in the idealized future we think lies in wait—once we get it right. My concern is that the suffering and associated chaos of civil failures will continue until no humans are left to suffer. What’s needed is an intervention, which will occur when humans discover the Law of Life, and figure out how to comply with it by re-establishing sisterhoods and brotherhoods.

I am sure that humans never would have imposed moral laws, had they realized that outlawing natural human behavior would sentence mankind to thousands of years of pointless suffering. But, once civil rule existed, the damage was done. Because of the brain’s remarkable ability to adapt, we immediately became dependent on institutions, states, and governments for a sense of purpose, meaning, identity, and survival, itself. Once dependent, our minds had no choice but to take on many other beliefs, to help us manage the suffering that our dependence on civil rule imposed. We found emotional solace through a panoply of beliefs, each promising a better future—belief in religion, ideology, money, science, education, or progress, etc.

When obeying rules, rather than the feelings of our souls, we are not taking care of life. As a consequence, our circumstances eventually become so miserable that beliefs and their promised futures can no longer quell the suffering. That’s the point at which people start turning to drugs for relief, and sometimes even suicide, which results when the pain of not being free to take care of life overpowers the will to live. That’s how bad things can get in a civil culture, while our languaged minds—still believing in the power of reason to solve our problems—continue on, blissfully unaware of the significance of the suffering. Through this suffering, our souls are trying to tell us something—that, in our effort to control the future through the force of law, we are not solving anything. Indeed, we are making things worse.

One of the many ways the civilized mind unknowingly discounts the suffering caused by institutional subjugation, is to mistake symptoms for problems. No program or plan can end domestic violence or suicide. Both conditions are reactions to, and symptoms of, the emotional suffering that blights human life, under civil rule.

It’s essential to distinguish between symptoms and problems. Suicide and domestic violence are not the problem. Both are symptoms. For every suicide, and for every woman who dies at the hand of her spouse, there are hundreds who go on living in intense emotional distress. Suffering is the problem. But it’s also a symptom of the real underlying problem: Modern humans are not free to honor the Law of Life. When our languaged minds finally recognize the real problem, and allow us the freedom to honor the Law of Life, domestic violence, suicide, and countless other symptoms of institutional bondage will cease.

Fact: Our souls are being severely abused under civil rule. That is the message modern people need to receive. Yet, the opposite occurs. We go around behaving as if our actions were not futile—as if our lives were not burdened with loneliness, boredom, dysfunctional family relationships, repressed romantic feelings, and anxiety. We behave as if the suffering didn’t exist. We have become experts at hiding our suffering, at times even from ourselves.

If people had any idea that we are living in denial of the Law of Life, and how powerfully doing so offends our souls, they would be shocked to the core of their being, just as I was years ago when it occurred to me. From our soul’s perspective, living in denial of the Law of Life is akin to solitary confinement. In effect, we’re like animals raised in cages—suffering, but never knowing how badly, because the cage is all we’ve ever known. One thing is certain. An animal in a cage can’t do the things it would do—the things it naturally loves doing—if it were free to survive normally. It can never get high on life, no matter how nice the cage.

As civilized beings, we, too, are emotionally caged, and can’t get high on life. The only advantage we have, over a caged animal, is that we can get high on the promise of beliefs—and that’s why we hold beliefs so sacred. Beliefs, indeed, are all we have with which to placate our souls, because we are not free to do so naturally, by taking care of life.

All animate beings have evolved with an innate addiction to the satisfaction that comes from taking care of life. Under civil rule, we modern humans have become addicted, instead, to the anticipation of future satisfaction promised by beliefs. Not free to honor the law of life by living in the moment, it’s the only emotional comfort a civil culture can provide. We need to recover from our addiction to beliefs. Until we do, we’ll never recognize our need for one another. Recognizing that need is essential, if humans are ever again to get high on life.

We all know that recovering from an addiction is not easy. The person must first admit to being addicted. Then, the pain associated with the addiction must become so severe that the affected individual wants to do something about it. The same is true of recovering from our addiction to beliefs. Despite the difficulty, recovery from belief addiction is happening in our world. Mankind’s suffering is now so great that people find themselves increasingly incapable of getting relief through beliefs. This is most evident in religion: The number of people who no longer believe in God has increased dramatically, in recent years.

Though many no longer find comfort in religious beliefs, we still find comfort in secular ones—belief in the future promised by money, institutions, law, marriage, science, and progress. So long as we remain addicted to beliefs, our souls will continue to burden us with increasing pain. It’s evolution’s way of punishing us for not taking care of life. Eventually, the day will come when the pain is so great that our beliefs can no longer hold it at bay. On that day, we will no longer be able to believe in anything that promises a better future. We will stand face-to-face with the reality of the moment, for the first time in our lives.

As scary as that thought seems, now, I think we will discover something remarkable, once we recover from the shock of it all:

Human beings are not afraid of reality—not with our sisters and brothers by our side.

We were born to celebrate reality the same way animals do, the same way humans always did, before institutions existed. That spiritually free humans are capable of living happy, contented, decent, and self-respecting lives is evident in the lifestyle of the Pirahã people, who still live a prehistoric way of life, in their ancestral villages, deep in the Amazon. (Chapter 8) When our beliefs have all finally evaporated, so will the idealized futures we now strive for. We will quite naturally turn to the people around us for the material and emotional support inherent to sisterhoods and brotherhoods. Those relationships will enable us to live in the moment, a joy that has been lost to mankind for thousands of years. In the reality of the moment, we will rejoin the other lifeforms on this planet in life’s eternal celebration—not by free will, but as the inevitable result of having recognized reality.