Consciousness and Survival

I’m recently back from two weeks in the Anza Borrego Desert in southeast California and I’m still digesting the journey. There is something liberating in calling an experience a journey. Journeys can be defined in many ways — they usually have a beginning, middle and end and can be bracketed by time, place, or process (like travel). But what I find to be compelling is the sense that “no feeling is final” … “whatever is happening now is not the whole story.”

This attitude made the time mysterious and rich. And it helped, because I went with many intentions — I was going to start every day with prayer and ritual; each day I was going eat ‘like this,’ walk (or run) so many miles, write or edit so many pages or for so many hours… And I did none of it. I met none of those goals, not even once! I had so many opportunities to feel like or call myself a failure. And I didn’t… again, not even once! Instead, I took the opportunity to be curious while observing “Reality.” “Here’s my intention, goals, the plan — what my mind wants (wanted) to do” … and “Here’s what I’m actually doing. My emotions, body, or “something’ … is saying something else.”

I could use the metaphor of a snow globe, which when turned upside down the peaceful winter scene becomes a blizzard and eventually resolves again. A better metaphor Is sandscape art – where different colored sands and liquids are enclosed between two pieces of glass, and when turned upside down, the sands sift through the liquids to create a new landscape of mountains and sky. Each day, whether sweet surprises or unwanted difficulties, different shapes, perspectives and stories came into view. All grist for the mill.

And I had help with the tumbling, though not always wanted:

• The weather varied from overcast, cold rain and a high of 55 to 95 degrees and no shade in sight.
• I was reading a book — Deep Survival (highly recommended) — about how humans respond to high-risk situations. (Spoiler alert – higher consciousness doesn’t help.)
• I received an e-mail message from someone who did a vision quest with me 20+ years ago berating me for “Cultural appropriation.”
• That was followed, within hours, by driving onto an Indian reservation where there was cheap gas and a hotel-restaurant-casino. (I appropriated only the gas.)
• The desert had many back roads (always poorly marked and some that our rental car should have never ventured on) leading to old pictographs, an oasis of tall palms jutting up unexpected springs, and abandoned homesteads where romantic dreams of a back-to-the-land life met the crushing and harsh reality of the relentless desert.
• The last two days before flying home were spent in San Diego which has the highest median income in the country… and boasts, among other things, thousands of yachts in the harbor, beautiful public parks with museums, botanical gardens, street theater, overly-expensive everything, universally-advertised political correctness and one homeless man, frustrated and angry because nothing there worked for him.

And there was more – too much to list — in this journey of wash, spin, and tumble dry. If I was looking to have some of my beliefs challenged or looking for new things to write about (and in both cases I was) I barely know where to start. And somehow, I also know the answer is, “Just start!”

So, I’ll start (and finish this blog) with this… inspired by Deep Survival:

Research from the past 100 years shows that people are emotional (aka physical) creatures, who normally do all sorts of things for reasons they are not consciously aware of. One of the main jobs of consciousness is to keep our lives tied together into a coherent story, a self-concept. Everyone is the hero in his/her own movie.

Basic survival mechanisms hardwired into us are the most powerful motivators of behavior, but to operate at their peak efficiency they must be out of range of what we label conscious.

This reminded me of a conversation — actually a debate — on religion between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, both very smart guys. Sam is a committed atheist and author of the “Waking Up” podcast while Jordan is well known for, among other things, his lectures on the psychological-spiritual lessons in the old Biblical stories that are important and relevant today.

On any purely rational, reasonable level, I thought Sam Harris was having the better argument. But Jordan then mentioned that all of this was subject to Darwin. What he meant was that every argument, action. or point of view had to stand the test of whether it would help survival or not. Those ideas which didn’t help survival, however nice or rational or noble they seemed, would just die out. They failed the Darwin test.

History is the story of survival. Archeologists can find artifacts of people who didn’t make it, but the world of today – which includes all actions, interactions, and politics — are between those groups, tribes, nations … peoples who did survive.

In risky or survival situations, any attitude that assumes “I already know” will cause you to miss important information. Survival instructors refer to the quality of openness as humility. We need to balance boldness and humility. But in today’s world, most people operate in an environment of such low risk that action or inaction and good or bad choices have very few consequences.

I’ve spent over 3 decades leading journeys that take people into the wild. When going into the wild or facing new challenges you must evolve a new way of seeing, a new plan. In the archetypal story of Icarus, his pride or “hubris” – his identification as hero of his own story — propels him too high. This urge was powerful and emotional, reaching for the sun. seeking transcendence, union, non-dual consciousness. And in his falling, he entered the world as it actually was (is).

We all want to be heroes of our own story. We commit to and identify with abstract notions of virtue, goodness, “higher consciousness,” and then want to police the world so it’s safe for people like us. But none of this helps –us or anyone. The world isn’t safe – never was and never will be — and we have to learn live in, manage, and thrive in a world of risk. We may want many noble things, including being “on the right side of history” but learning to live well and survive demands many humbling realizations that sometime only come from actually learning history.