More than Animal Expression?

Man saw the world and saw that it was good. Man saw its splendor and its danger. 

Following natural selection, man's evolution favored selection of the unconscious that he shared with many of the other higher mammals. Man increasingly separated the "doer" and pure consciousness, or the unconscious. Man actively went about survival the "seer/dreamer" capabilities of the unconscious increasingly softened man to another side of life apart from survival.

As man became more and more aware, it dawned in man's unconscious that there was a harmony and beauty and truth that man could evoke from within and share with his or her family, tribe, and neighbors. In seeing the seer, man gained both a practical awareness and appreciation that opened up the development of critical thinking and the celebration of life through the arts, religion, and love.

The sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, waters, the changing weather, the trees, the other animals, the other humans that shared space and time-- life was hard when man was hungry and thirsty and cold and betrayed, but, with a full stomach and a healthy body and a trusted social circle, life was indeed splendid.

In the caves, man passed long periods of time with few practical activities that could be carried out. Man used this time to hibernate-- not like a bear but like a man, somewhere between dream and the waking state, full of memory and reflection. In the mind's eye, man and woman alike saw those images that mattered to them most .. in particular the wild animals that the man hunted, and on whose sustenance that the man and his family depended. These images took shape on the cave walls at the tip of animal hair brushes left over from the feasts after successful hunts.

Man's grunts and whimpers gradually became more expressive, as standards were established among family members, tribal members, and between tribes. Increasingly, man began to use his emerging facility for speech, imitating sounds that he had heard and learning the benefits of creating sounds to express what he wanted. 

Man had long enjoyed the ecstasy of  beating a drum and hearing the sound of the drum and its rhythm and amplitude. Chanting with the voice added a counterpoint to the beat of the drum and expressed man's inherent spiritual tensions.

As man spoke and chanted the voices he heard inside his head, found objects to create amplitude and rhythm, re-enacted the great events of the day around the evening fire, painted the images that he saw in his mind's eye, worshipped the forces that he saw at work in his world... man was  distancing himself from the species that resembled him physically. Man was growing into a spiritual creature with emotions that he shared with his species, an awareness of his own existence, its mortality, its beauty, its hardship, its story and history. The leader of the clan and the leader of the tribe became the ideal to evolve toward.

Man saw the wonder around him, and man became self aware. A wide range of emotions developed and were felt by these early humans. Fear, awe, hunger, satiation, jealousy and envy were among the first, and love, respect, ambition, to name a few came much later. Gradually man came to feel God. God was all around him and inside him, but God was not far away or transcendental. God was behind the matter, and to be revered, to be sacrificed to, to be worshipped. God was synonymous with nature's power, of the life force's power. This power ebbed and waned. This power won and lost, but there was something very noble about this life force, something worthy of awe.

Man also saw the smallness of his existence in relation to the world around him. Man saw his connectedness with this world. His good fortune was the good fortune of the world. The world's good fortune was his, though a struggle was ongoing across the world to survive and prevail in a world designed with scarcity and plenty in relation to one;s response to challenges.

Man moved beyond animal expression as he developed his imagination and free will. Man had separated himself from the animal kingdom but not from himself. Man was in harmony. He was not moral or ethical but he was good, for he respected the earth, life, and life's forces. Like animals to this day, man never took more than he needed to survive. As man's imagination grew with each generation and multiplied with oral communication across generations, man's identity as a social creature remained, as his spirituality grew.

Man slowly came to find the concept of "love" useful, for it spoke of his innate social character in a way that strengthened the family and social group. This word "love" had no object, however, least of all to other people. "Love" was the opposite of "loathe," and love was warmth and togetherness, as loathe was coldness and rejection. Man attached this  concept to his identity and attached to it a personal nobility and honor to be true to love. In doing so, man was able to navigate a path of evolution that concurrently fostered a rich social fabric that afforded man security and protection and at the same time allowed man to develop his critical thinking capabilities and self-awareness.

It was man's self-awareness that made love possible. Without awareness, how can one love-- without consciousness, how can one behold the world as it is and have the awareness of mind and heart to stand above the moment-- in the present, past, or future-- and see oneself in relation to it.

Love and self-awareness made everything possible. Beauty, it was in man's attitude, and, when man found it, the world was ceased to only be a hellish arena for survival and in moments of tranquility and confidence became beautiful, practically perfect. Truth, man began to understand. Man learned that he could fool others, but they would not trust him again, and when man fooled himself he regressed from whence he came, into oblivion and darkness.

Man moved beyond the phenomena and occurrences to reflection and ideas. Man learned to agree on words not only for phenomena and actions; man learned to invent words that captured the thoughts and feelings man was experiencing. Man's language grew word by word, experience by experience, realization by realization. 

If man is not animal, what then could man be? The easiest answer would seem to be another type of animal, one that is uniquely more self-aware and disciplined than all the others. Not everyman. Most humans most of the time are animals, making it through the day, living for the next meal or the next orgasm or the next animal pleasure, albeit some pleasures are abstracted such as greed, arrogance, and egomania.

Some very rare humans have a a self-awareness and a sense of history and creation that is approaching world vision, a view of the world from a cosmic, holistic view hat transcends ethnocentricity and individual cultures and seems to flat above circumstance to view reality as a totality, as one organism inextricably intertwined since the beginning of time. These humans are stretching the limits of humanity to a convergence with the life force that underlies all living things. They are "jenseits" of animal and human expression and in tune with the harmony-- and the dissonance of life as we know as it. This is the realm of mysticism and mystery. To call something by words in this realm is to accede to a lower truth.