We must have been prepared for life when we were born. We had to breath, to suckle, to sleep and enable our mothers also to sleep. Our bodies knew how to grow by absorbing energy and our minds how to grow by absorbing experiences. These things can not be made to happen from outside. Life survives because of an inner guidance system.
Our intellectual instincts and primal emotions once guided us exclusively. Some original purpose, still renewed with each birth, drives our chemistry, and our emotions. Intellectual strength serves the purpose and so curiosity and a sense of adventure are driven from within. The original purpose is served by good judgment, so we develop it through the experience, through the feedback of pleasure and pain felt deep within. Through adversity we build character, and from fear we find courage. We know these things by observation, by introspection, from the evidence of other life forms, through the disciplines of anthropology and psychology, or from inspired spiritual teachings. Those things which are natural to us cut across all cultures.
I don't know what grand purpose started life, or is manifest in our emotions and innate knowledge. But I am moved by such thoughts and sometimes experience sudden rushes of insight. At these times I feel that I am rediscovering what I was born with, the original, and a sort of wisdom that enabled us to function simply without inner conflict. My life feels more sacred with these thoughts, more a part of the infinite chain of events. As I rediscover the mind I was born with, I am directed effortlessly to my proper destiny. Back in the Garden, there is no distinction between what I want and what I should.
There is great distinction between want and should today. The world has been reshaped, and it is not in harmony with our nature. We are fish out of water, guilt ridden for being who we are, grasping at addictive fixes, inadequate, despairing.
In nature we grow steadily and become strong. When propelled into puberty, boys and girls follow very different paths. Young girls develop the bodies and minds to care for their babies, hormones supercharge their instinct to nurture, to love, to create life.. They signal their readiness thereby enchanting the boys. All nestle closer to the point of it all.
Boys are born to fight. They must prove themselves worthy of lending their seed to the grander purpose. And while girls laugh at the boys foolishness, they are nonetheless drawn to strength and power as it is needed to protect them and their babies.
But forcefulness has become condemned, violence of any kind treated as a disease. That which is in the heart and soul of men is condemned and driven underground. The burden of aggressiveness is compounded with shame, and boys no longer follow their inner directives. They don't pursue the strength needed to be a father, only the symbolic and petty awards of the ball field. By deviating from the nature of mankind, society has lost its fathers.
It is nature's way that boys find purpose in their attachment to other boys. They challenge each other, challenge themselves, rebel against restraint of any kind, and aggressively develop their power and status. This is not an end in itself, but part of the passageway to manhood, where they reach their most noble goal, i.e. reproduction, indirectly through attachment to and support of a woman. They may have mostly sex on their minds, but it is the greater purpose that makes it so. The Men's strong body and outer directed mind are needed for nature's plan.
But in this man made society, boys are condemned when they harden into men. Women are condemned when they openly express softness and compliance. With natural male and female or Yin and Yang forces overruled by new social values, the stability of relationships are gone, the development toward parenthood has been displaced by training which seduces into perpetual childhood. The complimentary fit of male and female has been replaced by sexless competition.
The perversion of our natural inner directed ways is ancient, starting with the division of East and West. We have become externalized, exalting only the Ego. We are confused, at war with ourselves, and we are showing signs of battle fatigue -- stress, insomnia, suicide, perversion, addiction.
To some, Adam's forbidden fruit, the temptation that led to our falling, was the arrogant rejection of own inner nature. It was pride in our imagined superiority -- human chauvinism. To some, we weren't cast out of Eden, we walked out with a shrug!
Nature's plan calls for inner driven growth to a level of independence. But society calls for external authority driven dependence, and lifelong reliance upon external institutions.
Nature calls for risk taking and the development of inner courage, but society calls for external protection, insurance companies, and public welfare. Risk taking by individuals is considered eccentric or irresponsible.
Pain is one of nature's ways of guiding us, molding our development, but we are lead from it in man made society. Discomfort is thought to be an unacceptable intrusion into our will. We learn to escape our pain and run to external diversions. We are relieved from suffering by food, money, alcohol. Some work themselves to death, others crave perverse sex. The lessons we run from are lost, the pain being masked can not teach us, and serving our addictions becomes our new purpose.
Pleasure has likewise been perverted in our socialization. We must turn to society, to relationships, to our children for indirect pleasure. Experiencing direct personal joy is selfish, is masturbation, is the ultimate taboo. We are again, led into dependence upon externals.
We are thinking beings, yet discouraged from independent thought. Such is sacrilege, or rebellious. Parents, institutions, friends, all trained to externalize their own needs, want loyal, obedient followers, and all take part in instilling such ideas in our children. This perversion is resisted by those still driven by their original mind, and they challenge and confront. Such inner directed people may be thought of as uncooperative or selfish and insensitive. Following our script as written (?) is politically incorrect!
We are physical beings with muscles and tendons and chemistry to support them. We are designed for work, yet have been taught disdain for beast-like endeavors. Exercise is encouraged, but fruitful physical work is beneath our white collar mentality. So we ride bicycles that go nowhere, press against machines that do nothing.
As physical beings we are designed for action when threatened or frustrated. Our soul prepares us for aggression, but such individual action is outlawed, the right of self defense is compromised, and reliance upon external authority is offered as compensation. Sport takes the place of real aggression
So as our inner directed ways are denied, and after years of socialization, our conscious selves become aligned with the external. We become enslaved to the system and turn against the self. Physical aggression turned inward is recognized as hypertension and lowered resistance and antibodies. Psychological aggression internalized becomes anxiety and depression. The spiritual cost is the highest, and most people are crushed.
We survive now only through elaborate and perverse political and economic systems. The machine we suckle on has become a glutinous entity. The more it educates and feeds and employs and entertains us, the weaker, and more dependent we become. It helps us deny it all, to live in the fantasy. We are all unconscious, we are all drugged, we are all crazy.