Until individuals develop a mature I, they function in society like animals function in nature: instinctively. Human beings have the mechanism to adapt instinctively to the outside world and cannot "face it" "look at it" "confront it" "separate from it" until they are mature enough to not react instinctively to its conditioning. People "live" conditioned lives by their outside nature, like animals do, and humanize themselves and their society when they mature enough to free themselves from the instinctive conditioning. At that point they become "creators", they "innovate" forms that are then assimilated by society and form part of the status quo of the next generation. This dynamic interchange between individual and society throughout generations needs to be deeply explored and better understood. The aim of human life is to develop a mature individual: a creative being. Without "creation" the human being is simply surviving in the "natural" social environment just like animals survive in nature. Society is to the individual what nature is to the animal.
There is nothing "wrong" with instinctive life in animals and it is a necessary step in the human being's process but when the whole social life of the human being threatens to condition people into living purely instinctive lives without developing themselves enough to "create" through their life and work, then the human being enters a retrograde process of self destruction.
It is not only natural but naturally positive to be one with nature for an animal. Knowledge is not necessary. Likewise, human adaptation to the social environment surrounding us is natural. Human beings imitate, copy, act and react like others in the particular environment. This period of “imitative” life is what I call the instinctive period of the human being. While animals continue to imitate and reproduce their natural conditioning, human beings, by the sole fact that they posses “will” separate from the natural, instinctive period and begin to mature an independent “self”. Each human being is a source of “life”, of “inspiration”, of “new force” and the maturity of that being depends on the possibility of separating from the purely instinctive conditionings.
People in every nation are submitted to particular “instinctive conditionings” but people in every nation mature enough and develop a human consciousness free from the instinctive conditioning.
As we “globalize” what becomes clear is that we are all human beings with very different “instinctive conditionings” and that in as much as those behaviors confront our mutual understanding of “the human” we will continue to go to war.
Globalization is meaning that the national practices are confronted with universal practices. The individual is confronted with the human. Societies are confronted with the “universal”.
There are sound fears that “globalizing” will do away with national identity and that is certainly a possibility but at the other end of the spectrum is also the possibility of a mature human consciousness that will give new force and meaning to the particularities of each nation.
The tendency of globalization to implant a neo-liberal status quo the world around is presently being deeply questioned by the Tunisian and Egyptian, by the “shock of consciousness” that Wikileaks detonated.
Wikileaks has brought home the fact that we are now capable of communicating world-wide and that people everywhere who think alike can act together to question power. It is a very great evolution, not revolution, because we are not “revolving” with it. We are evolving. The consciousness that Speech and its Freedom are essential to the human being is one of the greatest steps for an “evolving” society. In as much as we are mirrors to each other we need to be able to “communicate”. Where there is communication there is “community”. “Community” as I understand it, is a social order that guarantees the healthy development of each of its participants in which a human being does not simply “function” but exercises his and her WILL.
To exercise one’s will does not just mean to do what one likes. The Will of a human being is not limited to an individual’s personal life for a human being is not separate from his or her society, the rest of the universe or mankind as a whole. Each human life exercises its will in five different dimensions:
The personal
The family
The social
The national
The universal
In the purely personal realm, a human being is just a fifth of his or her potentialities. The family, the social, the national and the universal act on him and her and they on them consciously or unconsciously, throughout life. Each realm has its own dynamics and they all interact in particular ways transforming each other.
Human beings, like animals, can align themselves in a society or live independent from society to a certain extent according to the “nature” in which they are to survive as much as the particular inclinations.
The hierarchic status quo of animal societies is purely instinctively conditioned to mechanisms of survival. Animal societies do not live to create but to reproduce. Animals have a purely instinctive “will”. They have basic necessities to satisfy in order to survive. Human beings have the same basic necessities that animals have in relation to their physical survival on planet earth, but besides an instinctive realm and function, in which the whole of medicine, nature and food can be placed, the human being has a dimension of movement with which we sculpt, construct, model, design from clothes to cathedrals, from huts to palaces; A moving realm with which we build bicycles, cars, planes and spacecraft. We transform the physical “nature” of our surrounding and adapt it to our inner whims.
Besides a “moving” dimension, the human being has an emotional dimension that allows us to feel the world; To “see” the world with our heart. To experience essential sympathy and antipathy and mature both into what is positive and negative for evolution.
The intellectual dimension of the human being has its own characteristics. We “think” but we only really think when we are mature enough to do so. In the meantime the mind adapts to the general current of thought, adapts and justifies one’s acts and behavior according to the conditioned structure. “Thought” can be “worked on” like the body can be exercised and the heart “purified”.
The sexual realm of the human being is used for reproduction like in animals, but it is also the supplier of “life energy” for creative purposes.
All these dimensions of a human being are and can be conditioned by society like nature conditions animal behavior. All human beings, in as much as they live a life strictly geared towards instinctive survival, reproduction and death live purely “instinctive” lives. They can “eat”, “work”, “love”, “think” and reproduce and never for a second experience more than a purely instinctive life.
“LIFE” in a human being is much more than instinctive survival. Evolution implies the development of “individual” as much as “social” will. The will as a quality of the “self” in the individual and a quality of the “people’s will” in society, is a “creator”. It is in the Will that people come to love, question or confront each other. It is “I” who stand with or against you, “I” who decide whether I move closer to you or separate from you, “I” who will my body, heart and mind to come into harmony with your “self” or turn against it. What people everywhere do depends on their will and their will depends on their consciousness.
“Consciousness” is the main characteristic of the “I”. It is the “state of consciousness” that prompts individuals to act and react in particular ways in similar situations. What then is “consciousness?”
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