WHAT WE ARE

Despite our intelligence humans are the most audacious beings on this planet – our history, story books and movies have millions of tales about how we act toward each other in idiotic ways, inflicting our selfish, callous misbehavior on anyone we don’t like, look down on, or who can be taken advantage of so we can gain something. You see this at every level of society – among pre-school children (forgivable for their immaturity and undeveloped social skills); in families among siblings, parents and relatives, in larger communities and between countries where wants and differences show up on a greater scale. This, despite increasing levels of education in adulthood and expected maturity in thinking. Everywhere, all the time, we misbehave and create conflicts between ourselves, at work, at play and in all areas of our lives.

Look for the root

Out of necessity, we have learned to cooperate and come to terms with each other’s interests to an extent, but although we are taught what acceptable behavior is and how to show it, why we misbehave is something we don’t learn about. We are not brought to face the reason why our misbehavior occurs in the first place, although we are taught about manners and decorum and the display of how to conduct ourselves acceptably within social circles.

We try to manage or treat the symptoms of misbehaviour but don’t focus on its cause, which is common among all humans. This originator of our behaviours and bad manners is our ego, defined in ordinary terms as ‘the idea or opinion of ourselves, especially our feeling of our own importance and ability’. It is this urge to assert ourselves which, while on the positive side pushes us to accomplish things, on the negative side it is the cause of our conflicts – one point of view versus another’s, mine versus yours.

We use the word ‘mine’ and while this is accepted common practice, it defines the divide between ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. Societies’ laws, in protecting ownership, further reinforce this idea. While these laws are needed for us to co-exist, peace and accord depends on how we relate to one another and whether we accept ourselves as one people: homo sapiens, humans of blood, flesh, and bones. Apart from racial differences and the way we express ourselves in language, dress, and culture, we are the same species.

What we really are

And we are in fact, a unity – as beings made entirely of energy, we are literally one with everyone and everything else, nature and inanimate things included: human bodies are made up mostly of water, a combination of two gases, and together with all the other elements that make our bodies we appear solid, and our sense of touch “proves” that we are solid. Look deeper at what these elements are made of, and we see how insubstantial we are.

All physical things and beings are a form of energy. It is difficult to imagine but at a sub-microscopic femto scale level (10^-15 m), atoms that we can’t see create the different densities in our body parts, from the liquidity of blood and fluids to the softness of flesh and the hardness of nails and bones. As a people however, probably because we all take different shapes and appearances, we are unaware of or ignore our sameness and conduct our lives with the idea that we are each unique, different and special.

Now, look outwardly beyond our selves and see that we exist on a spinning ball of earth and water within endless space, together with countless other planets, stars, and universes, some much larger than ours. Yet some people believe that humans are special beings in a special place, the only ones with a right to anything we want.

Many misbehaviours, one why

You can see this in our behaviour. Many are not even aware of our ego or how it runs our lives and are just carried along by its demands for pleasure, ownership, control, and the need to be appreciated. Yet, every single problem in the world regarding relationships – between people, among groups, or countries in conflict – can be traced to one or a group of egos that are asserting themselves. Problems may arise and escalate in families, among races, cultures, religious or political groups but the root cause is some people thinking that only their views are valid and should be more important than others.

But note an obvious but ignored fact, these views are just thought forms – ideas in our heads, influenced and made valid by our upbringing. Yet we as separate individuals or groups feel that these ideas, these thoughts arising in our minds, deserve to be recognised more than others’, and we literally fight over our differences.

It may be unlikely, but people could live peaceably if we were all taught to examine and realize that our ego is the creator of and responder to these ideas. This is a universal human issue. Not many are aware that these thoughts we hold in our minds create the conflicts within ourselves and in our relationships. We blame others for disagreeing with us.

Let us examine this issue. Just take an honest, commonsensical look at what we are and how we relate to things and people in our lives. In criminal investigations people say, ‘follow the money’, but in this investigation we should follow thought, word, and deed, because thoughts generate the words we use, that drive the things we do to accomplish our aims.

Mental drivers

Who or what do we think we are? Our mental states are not lasting – they flit from happy to sad, from loving to angry, very easily without too much provocation. In the physiology of these expressions, sensations arise through electrical and chemical signals racing through our bodies from glands to cells and muscles. The workings of our body create our expressions, affecting how we react, showing that we feel pain and are uncomfortable, or feel pleasured and become pleased.

And while all this going on in our bodies, our experience of these things happens mostly in our thoughts – endless pondering, wondering, worrying, reacting, liking, not liking, remembering, mentally tallying this that and the other, usually mundane things about how we relate to one another. And the reactions we show are because of ‘me’ and ‘my’ projections, how we expect happenings to suit what we prefer.

Then, we must deal with all the other I’s – other people. Their contrary and objectionable views, their intrusiveness, their interfering in our ways, their impositions on our time and emotions, their demands for things, for attention or sympathy, their insistence that they are right, and we are wrong about our beliefs.

It’s not that these expressions are right or wrong or good or bad. Subjective judgements about their moral value create more complications. The expressions are just such, and if we are not consciously aware of them, they create poor consequences in our relationships with one another.

Observe common everyday behaviour and you will see that we tend to look outward at how external things affect us and lack the inward-looking skills to become self-aware, to focus on ourselves. We are beings with a physical form that we need to sustain; we have senses that differentiate things; we have the will to decide and are conscious of all of this. As such we are an entity. So, what makes the decisions, or thinks the thoughts? Look again at another dictionary definition of ‘ego’ – “the ‘I’ or self of any person, distinguishing itself from the selves of others”.  Why have we not learned to become fully aware of its description of a mental separation, a division, but one that doesn’t need to be combative if we are more understanding, accepting and respectful?

It is this ignorance that blinds us to how we conduct our lives. We inflict our self-importance on each other because we are not directly aware of our ego’s expressions and, because we do not understand ourselves thoroughly, we reckon on other things to tell us whether we are doing things rightly.

We don’t appear to understand what we are, yet we come up with ideas that humans are the only superior beings and sole occupiers in what we refer to as our universe. If our planet is just a dot in endless space, what more are we? Surely, we cannot be the only ones within a space in which we could literally travel forever. Scientists tell us of stars that are a billion times the size of our sun, of planets and galaxies that are light years away from where we are. Which makes our vanity even more audacious.