What’s the Point of Being Human for Humans- Being?

What’s the Point of Being Human for Humans- Being?

My Best Answer (So Far)

With thanks and acknowledgement to Deepak Chopra, MD

Some 3 decades ago my life had pretty much turned to shit and I was left stumbling around in the dark, bumping into the furniture, and leaving a trail of excrement and a bad smell behind me wherever I went.

Then life said “Hey, you could grow something with all that shit, you know!” “Luck” intervened. Through an impossible sequence of chances and coincidences I met two people – Colin Hayes and Gail Leppard – who seemed to have whatever it was I was looking for. Following their example, I stepped into a number of questions in order to get experiences that I might otherwise miss. Well, I was desperate enough to try anything, and the world they had gathered around them radiated a lightness that was unfamiliar but attractive to me, and those who populated their world had light in their eyes that announced “Somebody at home here!.” So, having failed so spectacularly up to this point, I did something I'd never really done before -- I followed instructions.

From the experiences that followed (I was assured they would – and they did, and still do) , I hoped to get some insights into why the hell I had once bothered being born, not only as a human being, but as this particular one.

Thanks to a woman called Sheila Powers, I phrased my question thus - “What is the experience of being human for this human being called Barrie Barkla?” I figured that, if I could get some answers to some basic human-type questions for myself, then I might discover WHY – and maybe even get answers for the similar, familiar-looking beings surrounding me who seemed to have the same questions hanging over their heads. The only difference I could see between them and me was that they seemed to place a higher priority on things like getting recognised, getting promoted, getting laid and being right. I had already been through that stuff and had come up very empty, so I chose to commit, for as long as it took, to questing and generally poking my nose into philosophical, moral and psychological places most people don't want to look into.

This was going to be my Big Adventure. As tough as it has been sometimes, I have never regretted it. And for thrills it sometimes beats groundbase jumping.

Oh, the questions I committed to stand in? Nothing remarkable – "Who/what am I?"  "Why am I here?"  "Why is all this other stuff here, how did it get here, and how come I got landed with it?"  "And who the hell are all these people? What are they doing in my life? Who invited them?"  And for that matter, "Did anyone invite me, or did I wander mistakenly into the wrong party after taking a wrong turning coming back from the toilet?" I sure as hell didn't feel like I belonged where I was. I wanted to fit in – desperately, but no-one seemed to want me. After two decades of relentlessly pursuing a dream and a career, I felt like a lost punchline that had somehow got into the wrong joke and fallen flat.

One of the first possibilities I explored was that “human-ness” is a context – a way of being in this world (as distinct from being a baboon, a boab tree or a lump of rock). But it's a context that has long since divorced itself from the moment when it was Chosen, when someone or something asked “What would you like to be when you get born, sonny?” Divorced from the moment of aware chosing, being human had become a default-context – a Condition, in the same way as a fish is born into water. It's given. I was born into this condition called “human-being”, so much so that when the question “What would you like to be when you grow up?” was posed, the idea of being a firefly, a planet, or even just plain “happy”, didn't even occur to me as a possibility. I came to this Mardi Gras called Creation  dressed as a human, learned and adopted the dances and --- voila another variation on the theme of Human Being.

And, what's more, I discovered to my utter despair that, thanks to my ignorance, this “being-human” condition, and everything hat seems to go with it, was using ME in order to survive Itself. It existed before I arrived. Simply by being human I was perpetuating what I was born into, and it would go on just the same after I die. While the supply of human beings keeps on coming, Being Human will continue to survive. And all the conditions of being human keep leeching off most other people, too. The horse is riding the poor bloody jockey, and we can't get the damn thing off our back!

Well, that realisation stirred up the black dog in me alright! I spent all of ten minutes wondering if I could find someone to mercifully put me down. THEN – out of that despair came a possibility, followed by blinding flash of something so bloody simple and obvious it took my breath away........

The Possibility occurred to me that my purpose in being human might be to transcend the condition of being human. And I already knew from previous work that all I had to do to escape from being the victim of a condition is to choose it to be exactly as it is. Could it be this simple? Instead of resisting being human, fighting it, denying it, wanting it to be something else – all I needed to do was to surrender, to give up all that dodging and weaving, be fully warts-and-all human, and explore all the nooks and crannies of being human and say “Yes. OK. Thank you. I am this. Let's see what I can create with it.”

That meant my past up to that point was no longer a liability; it was an asset. My next step was to stand in the Possibility that the point of being human is to push the envelope of being human. Stretch the boundaries. Defy the borders. Dig deeper and dare higher. I find this well worth remembering when times are tough and my self-confidence wobbles. As far as I know so far, no other creature on earth has the capacity to redefine itself. We do.  I've done it, and do it again and again every other day. By actively accepting and taking a moment every now and again to find gratitude for progress made, then moving on to once more redefine another aspect of my experience, I ensure that I am still a work in progress, and hopefully remain so until I draw my last breath. My daughter did it, and prevailed. My eldest granddaughter has done it and is now utterly unlike the way she was 8 years ago. And yes, for her it is also a work in progress.

How humans gained this ability to reconstruct their “selves” remains a total mystery. Looking at physical remains, it’s possible—although controversial—to outline the evolutionary march from ape to hominid, from hominid to Homo, and finally from Homo to our specific species Homo Sapiens. But that orderly progression doesn't take into account quantum leaps that also happen along the way – sideways jumps that just happen, defying logic. Nor does it take into account the numerous similar species that co-existed with us Homo Saps until relatively recently.

Because of illogical happenings the physical evidence is blurry at times, and even a simple achievement like the discovery of fire is up in the air; estimates could be off by hundreds of thousands of years. Things like “wheel” and “fire” I stick in a tray labelled “Ideas Whose Time Had Come”, and am quite comfortable with the probability that each did not happen in one place and spread from there, but happened in many different places at around the same time -- there is solid evidence that this phenomenon of multiple birthings is quite common.

Back to the here and now, not a single physical trait explains why we are self-aware. We just are, each of us to a greater or lesser degree, but that seems to be less down to capacity than to our personal willingness to put our capacity for self-awareness into practice. 

It is Awareness gives us the ability to push the envelope of being human. Ten thousand years ago the higher brain, the cerebral cortex, was a finished structure, more or less. In other creatures, once their brains are finished, that’s the limit. An elephant’s huge brain allows, we think, for emotional empathy. Elephants grieve over the dead and are emotionally tied to one another. But an elephant’s brain can’t do mental arithmetic, write poetry, or invent the atom bomb. But then, maybe an elephant never had to write a sonnet to ensure its ongoing survival. Considering the time elephants have been around, maybe we're not so smart as we like to think we are.

The human brain is part of the secret, physically speaking, behind our incredible abilities with language, tool-making, art, and weaponry. But no one knows the secret behind how the mind uses this brain. And what is this no-thing called Mind that's driving us? On the one hand, we remain totally confused about who we really are, and on the other hand we impose our selves upon the landscape as it we're God's chosen creation. Good Lord, we don’t even know if we are basically good or bad. At the moment, original-sin religions, fear of lack (greed) and so-called “opinion” have turned us into baddies destroying the environment. But that’s a lopsided view, given the fact that no matter how horrible our behaviour, some people can look in the mirror and change it, while others remain utterly powerless to do so.

We cannot even agree amongst each other about a simple experience, let alone what is “good” and what is “bad”. Maybe the Mind has something to do with the confusion and right-fighting??? Maybe the human mind is the Problem, in which case it will never be, on its own, the Solution. If that is so, what is pushing – or drawing – us to ask with some desperation “What is the point of being human?” And is the search worth our while? Just because we can do something, it does not follow that doing it is a good idea.

If this is true—and it seems very likely—then what’s the next stage in pushing the envelope? Although some pushy people would like to dictate the direction the rest of us take – “for our own good”, of course – the fact remains that no one knows what the best course should be, because the whole point of human evolution is that no-one can predict where it’s going. Indeed, none of us knows what our next thought will be. We plunge into the unknown at every second. But in the face of confusion, uncertainty, and low morale, one possibility remains untarnished -- if we are willing, we are likely to become even more self-aware. That’s the pattern that has held good for all of recorded history, and despite every catastrophic setback and horrifying turn of events, the march of awareness continues in the hearts, minds and bodies of those who are willing to engage creatively with change.

Some people have even made Awareness their life’s work. They take it upon themselves to push the envelope into higher consciousness. What they report back to the rest of us then becomes the new frontier. “Wake up!" they say. "Here’s what we can become. Now choose.” That’s my message repeated over and over again. Until you become aware, though – as Dr. Phil says – “The best predictor of future behaviour is past relevant behaviour.” Put another way, without developing and exercising conscious awareness, we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Such human life is pointless. What stretches my tolerance is the possibility that the unquesting individual may well have come here this time in answer to a question: “What does it feel like to live a pointless life?” In which case, who am I to interfere?

Recently Dr. A. K. Mukhopadhyay of the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences, has developed a model for where aware human beings are headed, based on his theory of an ever-renewing theme of purifying Awareness and higher-frequency consciousness.  In a sense Mukhopadhyay has picked up the thread offered by Jonas Salk, whose later career after achieving worldwide fame for the vaccine that eradicated polio was devoted to the future path of humanity. Decades before we got ourselves into the present ethical, economic and ecological crisis, Salk saw that the evolution of our species would no longer be physical. The only way forward would be mental, emotional and spiritual. The force of evolution, which for millions of years has pushed us along a physical plane, has now been internalised. Salk sees the inner world as our future. If he's right, and I hope he is, politicians, bishops and lawyers the world over had better start looking for some radical de-briefing and a new day job before they too find that they have long been hurtling into a terminal redundancy.

The good news is that higher consciousness isn’t a spiritual aspiration open to a few gifted or annointed saints, sages, and gurus. In reality Awareness is a universal trait, not limited to humans; nothing could be what it is without awareness. And even the most unaware bozos are being unconsciously carried along by it, much to their growing bewilderment and resistance. I am synopsising here, but the essence of Mukhopadhyay’s insight and theory lies in the term “supracortical consciousness,”

The old, standard view of human consciousness is physical, based on primitive life forms that exhibit no-mind to evolved species like reptiles that have an advanced nervous system but still (presumptively) no mind, then lower primates, higher primates, and finally Homo Sapiens—in short, a 4-billion-year evolutionary march that saw mind emerge very gradually. Some humans feel guilty about many things, from war and crime to our despoiling of Nature, and we still arrogantly see ourselves standing on the highest rung of evolution, when the only real fact is that we were probably the last to arrive – so far. Until we evolved, we claim, mind was totally or partially undeveloped, as witness our unique “higher brain” (our term, not God's). When I read “higher brain” tripe like this I realise scientists know diddley-squat about Intelligence. It's the same kind of ignorant arrogance that assumes that extra-terrestrial forms of life will turn out to look vaguely like us, with 4 limbs, a head and a body. Scientists sometimes amuse me. Look at the lather of excitement they worked themselves into this week after they detected for themselves that matter and energy travel in waves. I can almost hear Albert Einstein yawning in his grave and muttering to himself, “I knew that ages ago, and told you so, too. But instead of getting on with it, you've spent decades and squillions of dollars to prove it for yourself, and you're no further advanced. Ho-hum.”

The problem with this physical view of consciousness is that it’s like saying that a better computer will make you smarter. In reality, it’s the other way around. When you’re smarter, you can build a better computer. That is exactly what nature did. Higher consciousness built a better brain, and using this ever more intricate mechanism, it pushed the envelope of mind—a process that hasn’t ended and never will. He assumes there has always been an organising intelligence higher (supra) than the cortex. Hence Mukhopadhyay’s choice of “supracortical” to describe it. I have a problem with this view because it appears to confuse “brain” with “mind”, which is a bit like confusing a car with its driver. And it takes no account of mental and emotional intelligence, which are something else again, but absolutely integral to how we handle and express our Being (drive the car).

The notion of a cosmic mind that human evolution is trying to reach isn’t new. It lies behind every spiritual tradition, even though the name for this supracortical consciousness has shifted. Sometimes it’s called God, sometimes Atman, Brahman, soul, or simply spirit. Mukhopadhyay unabashedly links his thinking to India’s spiritual past, which is not surprising since that's wher he coms from. But his overarching aim is merely scientific. In this regard he has offered a challenging hypothesis, which says that current sciences, including biology, chemistry, physics, medicine, and even the “soft” sciences of psychology, cannot explain what makes us human unless his “supracortical” consciousness is introduced. I'm not tied to that connection.

Whatever may be, a host of mysteries remain to tantalise and awe us:

1.     Why did Homo sapiens’ self-aware mind evolve? There doesn’t seem to be a need for it, since other species have thrived without recognisable self-awareness for billions of years. But just because we can't see evidence of self-awareness in other creatures does not mean, I contend, that it does not exist. Human sight is a long way from the be-all and end-all of vision. I say the same about Awareful Insight. In fact, if the current crop of human “leaders” is anything to go by, we could all be a lot closer to the vibrating frequency of a rock than a dragonfly. Fancy a herd of elephants lost in the West African desert, without water or food. Now imagine them getting together and voting for the hungriest, thirstiest, least experienced, most lost elephant in the group to lead them out of trouble! It just wouldn't happen in the elephant world, but in the world of humans? Every day.

2.     How did the human body learn to self-organise? We know the mechanics of the messages and instructions that go on in the womb to guide the kind of being that will develop, and we know a lot about chromosomes and genes, but what intelligence “thought up” genes and “told” them how to get the job done? Every cell has self-interest in surviving and reproducing. Yet there is no physical structure that contains the invisible ability to have a self in the first place. Not a surgeon on earth can yet go into the body and say “There it is. There's reason for being human under my scalpel”. Or any other being for that matter. Every time we think we've found “the answer”, more questions arise. The closer we get to a “solution” the further away it gets. God, I love a good mystery!

3.     Why do our bodies hold on to energy? For that matter, why do minds hold on so tenaciously to everything they hold dear? To survive. To “save” themselves, and anything they consider themselves to be, from dis-integration. Which is problematical because creation is a continuous process of integration, dis-integation and re-creation. But the human mind does its best impede that flow – the dharma.

4.     Where did evolution come from? Science says that the universe began as a swirling chaos, a kind of quantum soup that had no reason to evolve. But evolve is exactly what it did. Embarrassing ain't it? Maybe because the universe did not ever begin. Whoah! Now the finite mind is reeling, yes? A finite mind cannot encompass Infinity. OK, mind is the wrong tool for investigating this.

But something did happen in this void of Nothing -- Nothing being a code word for Infinite Possibility. Thought thought about itself, lowered its frequency from thought waves into ultra-violet waves, then into white light waves, infra-red waves and so on down into gross matter. BANG!! Sooner or later, something happened. A bump, a spark perhaps, and the Butterfly Effect came into play.

And Awareness watched to see what would happen next.

Entropy already had the infant cosmos in its grip, but something else said “No”. In the tension between counterbalancing opposites, a few constants perhaps allowed primitive matter to clump into atoms and molecules.

The journey from interstellar dust to human beings exhibits no logical reason. That may be because logic and reason were not there at the time and, possibly, never have been. Because we have learned to “mind” everything, we like to believe in logic and reason, and we worship whatever we identify as being “reasonable”, but that, too is as dicky and variable as the person creating it. Whatever happened because it happened. That's it. Am-ness changed and diversified its form. For no reason. To no end. No meaning. And it doesn't mean anything now that there was no meaning then.

And the rest would one day become history, and speculation, and theory, and mystery.

5.     Why is the universe fine-tuned? Fine-tuning is the term for how the various aspects of time, space, matter, and energy mesh to sustain a viable universe. With a change of less than a millionth in any constant, sometimes less than a billionth, the infant universe would have either collapsed in on itself or flown apart too fast for atoms to form. Well, how do we know that it didn't? Time was never a consideration. Who knows – what we're living in now may be god's version of Windows 10. What I experience now, however, is an exact, self-balancing universe that will one day curve in upon itself, disappear up its own fundamental black hole and the whole thing will start all over again.

Or maybe not.

No branch of science has yet been able to explain why reality is what it is, and I'm not holding my breath for that to happen. Rather than look for an “explanation”, I'd far rather look at the pictures from Hubble as large as I can get them and play Mozart and Beethoven full-blast while I gaze at the wonder of it all. Let the pointy-heads beat their brains out against dead ends. Sooner or later they, like me, will wake up in a process we call “dying”.

Physics cannot explain the origin of space and time, perhaps because it's outside the limits of physics, ot maybe because there  just isn't one. Biology cannot explain the spark of life and why it caused simple sugars and amino acids to become living entities. Psychology cannot explain where thoughts come from. In fact it took a mystic to point out that the thoughts that plague and the thoughts that nourish us are not “ours”, and that we are not even the thinker of those thoughts. We're being used, played with like and audience at a screening of “Deadpool”. Neuroscience cannot even explain how the dark, silent, watery recesses of the brain create a four-dimensional picture of the world filled with light, sound, and colour. Not the foggiest notion.

Am I losing any sleep over that? Does my ignorance stop me from exploring the mystery? Not likely. Curiosity is the better of me.

Now, you have a choice – a) Spend your term as a human obsessed with trying to figure out how the trick is done; or b) enjoy the ride; or c) both a) and b)! I'm just glad that this is the way it is. It's one helluva playground!

The only way to get past intellectual dead ends is to find a single organiser that knows what it is doing.  Has it occurred to anyone yet that the idea of an omniscient organiser is so attractive because we desperately want to find one, and maybe the discovery of one hasn't happened because such a”god” does not exist? All our searching for such a First Cause may have drawn a blank because there has never been a First Cause. There never was a Beginning. But we keep looking, because at the level of cosmic mind, only an all-encompassing vision that attends to the smallest subatomic particle and the vast reaches of outer space could possibly link us meaning-fully into a dynamic, coherent whole. Our tiny, unkind minds cannot abide the concept of meaninglessness, and they insist on creating god in their own image – a god that has known all along that evolution, life, creativity, intelligence, and Homo Sapiens would emerge to rule the kingdom. Then this god will one day turn to all His doubters (the goats) and say “See, I was right!”

Well, I don't know if that's how it will pan out, but I think not.

With all this in mind, I now suspect why human beings keep pushing the envelope of being human. Like other sentient beings, we're curious. Thanks to certain bodily and mental coincidences, we're able to indulge our curiosity a bit further than, say, an amoeba. But with that freedom to indulge comes a responsibility to heed the Law of Consequences, and the possibility that our profligate indulgences may lead to self annihilation. We now know that, just as the dinosaurs self-destructed because of their inability to modify and adapt, so we might go the same way for the same reason – our inability to change combined with a curiosity untrammelled by responsibility.

I think, though, there is still time.

The present moment is still a laboratory of possibilities. Infinite possibilities are embedded in pure awareness, and glimpses of them are available to those who develop a higher level of consciousness. It’s our destiny, while we are here enclosed in time and space, to unfold them one by one, to be amazed by what it means to be human, to grow in insight and wisdom, each day transcending our memories of yesterday, and then to move on to whatever happens next. 

As Arthur C.Clarke wrote at the end of “The Sentinel”....”He wasn't sure what he would do next, but he knew he would think of something.”

And I think that's the point.