Based on a series of conversation with my brother.
Self-awareness is often used as a defining characteristic of human “superiority” but, as of late, I honestly don’t believe humans are self-aware. Why? We seem to only be aware of the result, not the cause. The only concept we’re really aware of are those strikingly obvious.
For example; One may feel sad, but it will not mean anything and they might not even know why they are sad. One may feel pain, and they’ll have the resolve to relieve themselves of it. A typical person’s decisions are simply a consequence of those feelings. There is no goal to understand the cause.
Is not the inability to understand the self, and often aversion to do so, the opposite of self-awareness?
Feelings are almost universally regarded as thus: The result of either internal or external stimuli. We don’t understand them. A self-aware organism would understand the rightful cause of these feelings. Once an organism reaches true self-awareness, would there really be a need to act upon that feeling?
Perhaps we have grown too numb and dis-attached from nature and our world to be self aware. We’re meant to integrate with the universe. Instead, we feel the need to assimilate and conquer.
One might conclude that we are too lazy to be self-aware, and that most people would rather have someone else think for them, but I would argue that we are too sick to be.
At this point, everything from “brain fog” to a caffeine addiction causes us to become almost terminally anemic. We only respond to the most primitive parts of ourselves: feelings. For example, when someone cries or feels threatened, it’s almost always along the lines of “but I don’t understand!”
Pretend you are so numb that you only notice explosions. This is what we have become as a race.
Where a truly self-aware organism sees its place among the universe, we lack the power to comprehend so many seemingly subtle aspects of life. Understanding of ourselves and our environs would simply yield the truth in things but we choose “not to understand” (ignoring environmental issues, the impact our lifestyle has on this planet, and even arguing against pressing issues as if they’ll decide to disappear if we believe in the contrary long enough). What is that? It still is a conscious choice.
It isn’t that we aren’t capable of understanding, but it appears that the modern man has become so numb and accustomed to being pounded by daily stimuli it takes a fireworks show to get their attention. Political issues, for example, are just that; a fireworks show.
It has come to the point where these obviously stated, overworked and tired concepts are what captures our attention and willful cognitive analysis. We do not look at the world around us and say things like; “Oh that’s no good. Plastic doesn’t decompose easily so we’ll end up with a lot of it everywhere…” Instead we respond to Capitalism, or financial interest, which allows you to bring plastic into existence because it’s better for business. Instead, we’d have to form a new political set of ideals focused on the world around us, we’d need to bark about them, harp on about them, advertise them on television, teach them in school, and only then would you get the attention of people today. Give us a few more generations, and we’d act like nothing more than zombies hungry for cheeseburgers.
Some might argue that our “numbness” can be credited to greed and being addicted to a life style that results in self-intoxication and pollution of both environment and man. But greed is a harsh word to use considering we were encouraged to lead that sort of life. We don’t look at the big picture, and that being everything. We are kept too “unaware” to be self-aware in the first place. If you are truly self-aware, concepts like land ownership, business, governments, potato chips, become so small, so distant.
In the end, to understand the present means you would have to reach far back to the roots and understand the past. You would have to ask where it all started, and why.
Consider Gobekli Tepe, for instance. One day, we all go nuts and you would almost think it was a global phenomena. One’s imagination could almost contrive the image that man was happily living free and blissful in nature as if the world was a giant garden of Eden and one day we decided to go ape shit and have been doing so ever since. Why? Because “we can do a better job” than the natural order?
We started off as intelligent and chose to be less.
In the end a gorilla happily chewing on some plant is more self-aware than the modern man. It knows what this plant does, and provides. It knows what hunger is, what causes it, and what to provide it. We, on the other hand, eat unhealthily, get sick and fat, and wonder why we’re sick or fat. Basically, we eat what we’ve been told is good for eating by people who have made feeding us an industry. We don’t care what it is, where it came from, or what it really does. Our senses are devastated, and when someone decides to live different or tell us otherwise we get offended or intimidated. We take something, shape it into something else, and yell on about it until everything simply conforms out of a desperate act for mercy; “Yes, yes, yes. The church is right, please, shut up now.” Now do this for several thousand years.
It appears that somehow we decided that really understanding the world wasn’t so important. We thought we knew everything and simply stopped trying to think.
Gods are born out of ignorance.
We have found it easier to believe in a storm-god than to understand the storms, and their needs. Storms do what storms do. What humans do is turn them into a science; bring them to their level. Turn them into gods or otherwise. Popular science isn’t so much about understanding something than finding a way for us to become stimulated by it. Simply understanding a storm isn’t good enough anymore. Knowing the tell-tale signs of one isn’t what common man will do anymore.
What we do is try to put names on the storm, avoid the storm, build walls against it instead of learning how to live in unity with it and harnessing what it has to offer to improve our lifestyles. We’d rather go on burning fossil fuels before we utilize our readily available resources.
Our science is all about “conquest” instead of “unity”. We change the land to accommodate for the storms, and unsettle a thousand other things in the process.
We don’t seem to care. We take nature, build a bunch of roads and houses over it and what’s left we fence in and call it a “park” or “natural preserve”. We won’t understand why a tree might be in our path, and will take it as a dumb dead tree, cutting it down if it’s in our way.
Along the way of our brief existence on Earth we decided we don’t need to understand. That we are above all this. That we are better and can do it better than all the natural order. Thus our downfall?
We can not do better than the natural system that is so infinitely complex yet works in such perfect unity with itself. We can live in unity and attempt to comprehend. In light of this, calling these things “natural resources” becomes an ignorant statement, yet we continuously regard nature as a primitive machine.
When a nature documentary talks about the different forms of life in Africa it paints this hostile, primitive, evil picture; parasites, diseases, vicious carnivores. All things that we need to conquer, and control. In the end the most vicious element in Africa are the AK-47 touting humans.
If man where truly self-aware he’d personify the land he walks on in reverence for all of life. “Pagans” almost had it right. What does this land need? What does it do? How can we adapt? Isn’t “adapt” a cornerstone to evolution?
In the end man doesn’t even adapt anymore. We stopped evolving because we are too “lazy” and domesticated to. We’ve come to a point where we refuse to evolve with the universal order and have created our own “existential reality” that we are “dying out” in. We are stagnant and one could suppose that if there be another major natural change we have become so inflexible it could very well be our doom. Whereas the entire planet will adapt, evolve, understand and work in tangent with any change.
Humans almost seem not to be part of this planet anymore. We have made ourselves alien. The only world we could live is the one we invented.
We fail to understand, however, that even the components that yielded the Bismark were pulled from the Earth. Man is still part of the Earth and dependent on it even though he would like to believe that he is more superior to any living organism on this planet. The only thing “above” the natural order is the natural order itself. Perhaps this is where the concept of “a God” stems from; a being described as being the ultimate consciousness, above all. We dare to associate ourselves with such a concept, and that we are #2 in this list when we hardly even comprehend it. Then we get technical about these silly ideas, from religions and sciences, bickering amongst each-other for the thrown of “who is right”. Where, in conclusion, humans can’t possibly be considered self-aware.
More “Causal Observations” here.
