by Crow Qu’appelle

And the heart reaves on its madness, tracing that sore.

Bitterness blooms its own rare fruit

Out of the spiked earth, scars of alienation

Lost is the primeval oneness

What unity prevails?

Desire.

That the bomb should drop,

great cities go down,

all the heckling nations rub each other out.

That I alone escape to the primeval rainforest,

encounter there the lost epiphany,

the last Pocahontas, and on her deep, uncomplicated flesh

recreate the race.

This is from my favourite poem. These words, written by the monk and beat poet Brother Antoninus, express a deep desire for a return to state of harmony with nature and with one another.

This is the desire that has animated me for many years, and has fuelled not only my spiritual search, but also my activism.

It is the sense that things are not as they should be, that things have gone horribly awry, that the dream of life has become nighmarish, and that it would be monstrous to adjust to the twisted new reality.

A world has been destroyed, and we can never go home. Doom has come, and the poet alone mourns its loss.

Part of the beauty of poetry is encountering an expression of something that your soul has felt, yet has never been able to put into words.

What Brother Antonius expresses is the pain of separation from God, represented as the exile from Eden; I experience a sense of transcendence, knowing that I not alone in the existential anguish that is so much a part of me.

In a few words, the poet reveals the secret, intimate pain of my alienation to be nothing other than the human condition itself.

The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that Life is Suffering. And three of the world´s major religions establish early on that we are being punished.

Doom has come, and the poet alone mourns the death of something beautiful. We have lost our innocence, perhaps we do not even deserve to go home.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

– Albert Camus

We are those who refuse to submit. We are those who will not obey.

We are a people, and we have a history, or, rather one should say, we have many histories, the strands of which are braided into a tradition, the anarchist tradition that belongs to anyone who dares to claim it for their own.

Anarchism is the philosophy of freedom. Understand – you are a free person. You are free to use your body and mind in accordance with the wishes of your spirit. Freedom is not a political matter. It is a fact of nature.

So why is this? Why do we have free will? How did we get it?

If we do ask the question, however, we soon find ourselves thinking about consciousness itself. Why do we exist at all? Why are we conscious of ourselves? Why do we have bodies, and why are we able to think? Does consciousness come from matter, or is the other way around?

I don’t claim to know, and suspect that anyone who does is either does is either faking it or crazy.

Nevertheless, I wish to propose a theory: that individual consciousness is not our original state of consciousness.

At an earlier period in the evolutionary development of our species, we may have had very little conception as ourselves as individuals, so immersed we were within the group-soul of our pack.

Are bees conscious of themselves as individuals, or they mere facets of a hive mind, as brain cells are the brain? Could something similar have been the case with our species? Was there a time where the only conception that we had of ourselves was of as part of the group-soul of the pack?

Could this be the true meaning of the “Fall from Grace” that is described in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden? Could the emergence of individualized self-conception have been a tremendously painful process? If that is true, that means that everything that comes from thought is informed by this primal trauma. It means that this pain of separation permeates every aspect of our culture, for as far back as anyone can remember.

Could it have been, at one time, that we were “with God” because we were not yet conscious of ourselves as individuals? Were we “with God” because we were not yet fully ourselves? Was our Fall from Grace the very moment when the first human began thinking of himself as an individual rather than as the member of his pack?

Does it follow then that thinking is a kind of mental disease that is the cause of all our suffering? Is all of human history a consequence of the unresolved trauma of our exile from Eden?

How did thinking arise, anyway? Did it emerge gradually, or did it arise suddenly? Is it possible that some sort of paradigm-shattering evolutionary leap occurred? Was thinking simply the next stage of our natural evolution, or did thinking become necessary for our survival somehow? If so, how?

Is the nightmare of history simply due to the fact that we’ve been misusing our intelligence for the past six thousand years or so? Or are we simply organisms with fatal flaws which render peace impossible? Will we learn to establish harmonious, peaceful societies? Or is Mankind a failed experiment of an uncaring universe?

In recent years, speaking about the near-term extinction of our species has become so common that it’s banal. Yet people really don’t seem as concerned about this as you might think.

Sometimes it feels to me like a lot of people are indifferent as to whether we as a species should survive. In all of recorded history, has there ever been such apathy?

Will the end of history be our own senseless self-annihilation? Will all the heckling nations rub each other out, leaving a trail of destruction on their way to oblivion? Will people greet the destruction of the world they have known with open arms? Will they go silently into the night, comforting themselves with the thought that at last the march of civilization has faltered?

I don’t think so, and Ill tell you why. This attitude neglects some key facts. For one, anatomically modern human beings have apparently been around for over 100 thousand years. History begins six thousand years ago.

For the vast majority of humanity’s tenure on the planet, we were presumably living in small tribes, hunting, gathering, farming, playing games, making love, raising children, singing songs, and so on.

If what they say is true, we were doing this for tens of thousands of years before anyone got around to starting a civilization. This is a remarkable fact which really doesn’t get the attention that it deserves.

If the scientists are to be believed, we lived in harmony with nature for the vast majority of our history. This is a fact which blatantly contradicts the bleak view, implanted in our minds by Hollywood, that humans are a virus, a disease afflicting the planet. That position is simply not supported by the facts. Something else is going on.

The question becomes ever more fascinating when you consider that our Stone Age ancestors were every bit as intelligent as we are. The question then becomes: What did they do with their intelligence? Why didn’t they build cities? Why didn’t they build pyramids?

The obvious explanation was they didn’t want to. Building a pyramid is a lot of work. Perhaps the idea never occurred to them, or perhaps it did, but they had better things to do. Maybe they did actually build all kinds of cool things, including pyramids, but all traces of them were destroyed by later civilizations. But it seems fair to presume that if they were as intelligent as we are, they must have known all kinds of things that we don’t know now.

It really is puzzling that this question doesn’t get more attention that it does, but it’s easy to see why. Modern propaganda is all about convincing the masses that the state exists to serve the interest of the citizenry. If that involves incarcerating millions of people (as in the U.S.), or exterminating minority ethnic groups (as in China), well, you can’t make an omelette without making a few eggs. While some aspects of statecraft might offend human decency, the public is assured that such unpleasant abuses are undertaken in service to the Greater Good.

The powers that be might not want people finding out that for the vast majority of the time that humanity has existed, we have lived without government, in harmony with nature, in accordance with natural law. In other words, we don’t need rulers. And what’s the one thing that the ruling class really doesn’t want us to figure out? Precisely that – that we don’t need rulers.

It’s incredible, really. Most people today struggle to imagine an anarchist society, yet our ancestors lived in such societies for millions of years. If they could do it, then so can we.

It is interesting to think about the fact that three of the largest religions in the world all teach us that we are cursed from the moment that we come into this world. That’s kind of a weird belief to teach children, isn’t it? That’s a weird thing for a people to believe about themselves, isn’t it? Why did they feel so wretched? Why did they feel so cursed?

Well, I could think of a few reasons. One is political. You can’t think very hard about religion without questioning who benefits from people believing any given thing. For example, maybe the story of the exile from Eden was used to teach slaves that they deserved to be slaves. After all, in the Bible, God doesn’t only banish Adam, but also curses him a life of toil. Could you see how a slavemaster might weaponize such a belief?

But a purely political explanation doesn’t satisfy me. I sense a deeper meaning, because I sense it with my own mind, feel it in my own blood and bones and brain. I too have felt wretched. I too have felt cursed.

Could this thing, which we call a curse, really be an unresolved trauma shared by all members of our species? Could the curse of which they speak be the birth of the ego? Could this curse describe the emergence of individualized consciousness from the group-soul of the pack?

The Bible says very little about the fire-and-brimstone place of torture that has come to form the concept of “Hell” in the collective imagination. The Biblical description of damnation is of a place or state of being “Without God”. Think about that. If you are without God, you are in Hell.

Could it be our very existence as individuated atoms of ego-possessed consciousness is some sort of karmic punishment for crimes committed in another life? But how could this be, unless we were already individuated units from God, that this to to say, separate from God? How could we deserve punishment if we were at one with God, that is to say, fully immersed in the group-soul of our tribal mind? How then could the Fall occur? How could we be guilty of transgression, if we had not yet become individuals?

So here’s my theory: We’re not guilty. It wasn’t our fault. Something happened, and the process of separation from the group-soul was deeply, deeply traumatic. People then tried to come up for explanations for what had occurred, and settled upon the idea that it was humanity’s fault somehow, that we were being punished for some obscure transgression committed by our ancestors in another world… After all, who else was around to blame?

Anyway, this is my theory. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it makes more sense to my mind than anything else I’ve heard.

Whether we are in Hell or not, this is the world that we must live in. What are we to do? Can we regain what we have lost? If we cannot return to Eden, what would be the next best thing? Can we create a new Eden here on Earth?

If so, how? Where do we begin? How can we reconstruct what we have lost, when what we have lost is a part of ourselves?

My best answer is to think the group-soul. How would we behave if we were not thinking of ourselves, first and foremost, but of the group-soul of our fellow human beings? What if we were to ask ourselves: What is good for my friends and family? What is in our best interests of my soul-group? What can I do that will be of the greatest benefit to the other members of my pack?

If we focus on that, everything immediately makes more sense. To act correctly is to do that which benefits the fellow members of your community, to act incorrectly is to to do that which does not. Seen from this perspective, morality is just common sense. Our lives are better when our neighbours are happy, peaceful, and well-fed. They’re also more fun.

So why does morality seem like a complicated subject? Doesn’t it all boil down to something very simple? Where do all these problems come from? So far as I can tell, all tricky moral questions arise when the wishes of the individual come into conflict with the sense of duty or obligation towards a group that they are a part of. Before the Fall, there would have been no such tension, because there was no ego capable of experiencing itself as apart from the group-soul of the pack.

Could it be that for millions of years, we hunted and ate and slept and mated without any conception of ourselves as individuals? Could it be that we fell from this higher state of consciousness? Could this explain why human beings love to lose themselves in immersive group experiences such as theatre, sports, or religious ceremonies?

It would be hard to deny that spirituality is an intrinsic part of human nature. Could there be a neurological explanation for the ubiquity of magic, shamanism and religion in every corner of the globe? Could it be that our biology is primed for such phenomena because we each possess neural circuity meant to foster energetic attunement to one another?

So if you don’t believe in God, and have difficulty understanding why humans have always been fascinated by this idea of God, consider this: It may be because the idea-of-God activates this neural circuitry. It may stem back to an earlier time in the evolution of our species.

Perhaps the sense of belonging to a super-being of sorts is embedded in our DNA, because we evolved first as a pack animal with a group-mind, and only later became individuals.

Let’s compare the two ideas, that of God and that of the pack-mind. Let’s first ask ourselves how the idea of God operates in the psyche of a religious person. Such people may believe that God loves them, and will take care of them. They might believe that there are some things that God wants them to do, and others that he does not want them to do.

They might believe that good behaviour will be rewarded by God, and that bad behaviour will be punished.

Do you not see how all of these ideas could be inherited from an ancient conception of the group-soul of the pack?

I’ve never heard anyone propose this theory, but it seems to me so logical that I’m amazed I’ve never heard it before. I wonder whether this idea might even be acceptable to atheists.

If my theory holds water, this neural circuitry exists in both people who are religious and people who are not. One could say that that neural circuitry simply isn’t activated in people of a materialist persuasion, but it seems more likely that non-religious people activate this neural circuitry through other means, such as the appreciation of art, which serves the same role as religion in stimulating spiritual imagination.

When you’re lost in a good movie, for instance, you are relieved of your sense of individuality for a moment. Through imagining the lives of other people, one enters into a realm within which they experience some sense of being part of a group-soul. What we can observe is that human beings love to be entertained, and this fact might provide a further clue.

When you are truly entertained, that is to say that your attention is fully captivated, you are in trance. Why do human beings love to go into trance so much? Could it be because trance relieves us momentary of the burden of being individuals?

When we are entertained, we are not thinking about ourselves. Could it be that the blissful, temporary loss of self-awareness which we experience when we are entertained is so enjoyable to us because it offers a reprieve from the pain of being an individual?

Make no mistake – it hurts to be aware of your separateness. It hurts to be an individual. It hurts to be separated from the group-soul of the pack. There must be a reason why people are so eager to forget themselves. There must be a reason why people love to go into trance.

The question then arises – how and why did this Fall from Grace occur, and one interpretation comes easily to mind. Individuated consciousness would form in the mind of a human who was separated from his or her pack for some reason. I suppose this could come about due to a natural cause of some sort, but the more likely explanation is that individuated consciousness began out of necessity when a human was banished by his or her pack.

Humans, like wolves, do practice banishment, which is the reason why there’s such a thing as lone wolves. Almost always, they are males who challenged the dominance hierarchy of the pack. They tried to be Alpha and lost.

Imagine the pain of a wolf who has been banished from his pack as punishment for his rebellion. Imagine the suffering and the whimpering of that lone wolf, shivering in the cold night, far from the warmth of its den. Imagine the pain of realizing that you are alone in the world, that you must fend for yourself, that the one thing you desire most in the world will be forever beyond your grasp.

This is the condition of being human. This is the exile from Eden. This is why the Buddha taught that life is pain.

Could the consciousness of civilization itself be built upon this psychology? Does the nightmare of history emerge from this trauma? Have we as a species been lashing out at the world because that trauma exists at the core of our psyche? Doesn’t history make a lot more sense when you think about it that way?

For what is civilization, if not for an attack on creation? Civilization was never about getting what you wanted. It was nastier and more brutal than that. It was about conquest, about taking things from others, just to show you could. It was about making them obey you. It was about proving your strength, and it was about preventing others from enjoying their lives. It was about dominance.

If you went back in time and did everything that you could to be an asshole on purpose, you couldn’t do any worse than the ancient Sumerians did. It takes incredible violence and cruelty to build any empire worthy of the name. Such an endeavour really could only be the work of a people consumed with hatred.

Whence arose this hatred? Why did human beings feel this urge to dominate both nature and their fellow man?

One possible explanation is that human beings are just nasty and brutish by nature. But if that were true, why didn’t empires emerge a hundred thousand years ago? Are we to believe that human nature changed somehow along the way?

The idea seems absurd, until you realize that is exactly what we have been led to believe our whole lives. Again, as far as we know, anatomically modern humans, whose brains were just as sophisticated as ours are, have been around for over a hundred thousand years.

The mainstream narrative skims over the first hundred thousand years of our history and goes straight to the bloodiest episode that humanity has ever known, that episode characterized by the centralization of power in the hands of the state. It then concludes that humans are nasty and brutish, that barbarians will be forever at the gate, and that we therefore need a powerful government in order to protect us from ourselves.

This is an absolutely absurd narrative, and it seems insane to me that so many people believe it. Most people who believe this narrative probably don’t even know that they believe it. So deeply is this belief ingrained within us that questioning it seems foolish and crazy to most people. Isn’t that insane?

We’re talking about the most consequential development in the history of our species. We’re not talking about something abstract here. We’re talking about possibly the most important thing that we could ever hope to understand. And yet, crickets.

It really is mysterious, isn’t it? If our ancestors lived in peace and harmony for millions of years, wouldn’t be a good idea to learn a thing or two about them? And why, after millions of years, did things change? What caused the rise of empires?

If it is true that we lived in harmony with nature for millions of years, then something extremely traumatic must have happened to our species to allow for the rise of civilization.

Perhaps it was indeed that the ego was invented out of necessity by a human who had been banished from his tribe.

I don’t really know how this idea would spread from one person to a whole society, but let’s put that question aside for now. Ideas do have to be born at some point. Not only does this theory explain why human beings are so obsessed with the idea of God, it also explains why humans seem to have a vendetta against nature itself.

Whether my theory is correct or not, if we’re trying to awaken from the nightmare of history, we need to figure out happened, and heal from the trauma that has been causing us to do such horrible things to each other for such a long time.

This traumatic event, whatever it was, is represented in Christian mythology as the Fall from Grace. We were exiled from the Garden of Eden, and we can never go home. Even the fact that this story is at the heart of many world religions. We all feel it, and our ancestors felt it too, going back thousands of years. Is this not a great tragedy?

Nature itself represents the existence of the one thing that Man most desires, which is also the one thing that he can never possess – the group-soul which he so desperately wishes to rejoin.

In reality, though, returning to Eden is not an option. We are in this world, and we must live in it.

And this is where anarchist philosophy begins.

Further reading:

What is real anarchism?

The Withway: calling us home