Primal Self in Action

I’ll try and keep this simple for my own sake, but I don’t know if I fancy my chances. (edit: Actually, now that it’s been written it’s the last long paragraph that I finally get to the core of this if you want to skip the other bits) 

Humans are extremely complex beings, obviously on a biological level, and with what we could call the pure animal drives, whilst also in terms of consciousness depths endlessly beyond and superfluous to a ‘biological’ mode of existence, such as appreciation of art, an ironical or absurdist sense of humour, etc, etc. We can extend this pathway of refinement of consciousness into the self as spirit, and where the more in the realm of the spirit one is the less tied one is to the animal drives. Fasting can be mentioned as even a kind of battleground of self seeking to override the animal drive to deepen access to the spiritual. If we look at it closely enough, good and evil even more or less equate to a greater or lesser domination of self by the primal drives, and gratification of these drives even wilfully at the expense of others, where their pain even adds to the pleasure, as this is an intensification of the triumph of self. So it’s evil as egotism. And to add where animals are naturally dwelling as animals, and  it’s not correct to say a human, with all his complexity of consciousness, is simply doing so also. For someone to be a Jeffrey Epstein is a huge perversion of self. It isn’t simply about animal pleasure, there is a pleasure in terms of the mind in the perversion - and that is the pleasure of evil. The very awareness of it as perversion is the essence of soul of this world, the world of evil.

This has gotten way beyond what I wished to focus in on! So all that wasn’t to say the biological self and drives are evil, but the self as slave to them is. There’s obviously all kinds of ideological divides here: of glorification of the self as simply animal or the spirit, of wishing to escape the animal self with for instance even religious sects of castrates taking this to extreme levels, and on the other hand, the glorification of self as animal, and wishing to deny the spirit - another form of self-castration.

Finally I’m getting around to the simple thought that I was looking to express! Even and maybe especially for someone who wishes to deepen the living spirit within them, the immense power of the animal drives must still be acknowledged, and not just simply labelled evil, and something shameful to escape. What is possibly the most immediate and powerful means of seeing this biological hardwire in action in everyday life, and its prime motivation of self-preservation? You might think hunger or sexual attraction, but we are able to withstand those instincts, however powerful. We don’t just leap on beautiful strangers, or grab delicious looking food from a table outside a restaurant as we pass by and are tempted. So here the self is more than capable of resisting the animal drive. The primal self is here nothing like absolute master.

It struck me yesterday how to witness the greatest access to this animal hardware within us, that is operating independent of our conscious selves, and which it is nigh on impossible to override. It’s very simple. Close your eyes whilst walking. Do this somewhere even where there is no one else around and no obstacle in your path that you need to avoid - say on a beach, an empty football pitch or open field. So there is no need for you to see what is around you, and yet what will happen after just a handful of seconds? In my own experience, and I’d imagine it would be very much a communal one, after the first few seconds where one is fine, suddenly I hit this kind of wall where the need to open my eyes becomes irresistible, impossible to ignore and overcome. It’s not a question of my conscious self being in fear. I know I have just looked a few seconds earlier and there is no reason I can’t simply keep walking with my eyes closed. I am not about to walk into the path of a car, fall off a cliff or whatever, but what is happening isn’t the conscious ordinary thinking self. I’ve instead gone into the primal circuits of the animal self, and walking around with one’s eyes closed an environment that one should always be aware of as potentially threatening is an absolute no no! And though my conscious self wants to keep my eyes closed in this little harmless experiment in being, it’s just impossible for me to do so. My primal self, hardwired into my biological being, completely dominates the moment. It is being threatened by the strange conscious self ‘upstairs’ acting suicidally in its relationship to external reality, and so the massive drive for self-preservation kicks in. Unlike with the other examples, because of the wilful cutting off of sensory information, the primal self experiences the situation as being placed in immediate danger of extinction, and with very good, very ancient reasons, the conscious self is completely over-ridden.

Of course one could train oneself to gradually make steps even here in expanding one’s resistance to this drive, but that’s not in any sense a counter-argument to this.