Let's Pay Attention to Evolution to Find Out Who We Are

I have been looking over some animal research on evolution.  There are literally thousands of studies but two stood out for me.  The first, done in the early twentieth century, and the second very recently.

In Russia, mid 20th century they took a group of wolves who generally remain wolves throughout their lives and do not change easily into pussy cats, and selected out those who were most gentle when approached.  They were raised with care and gentleness as you would a dog. Guess what happened in one lifetime?  They became dogs.  They had a different coat, many different colors and shades, their hormones and bone structure was different, their behavior tame and playful, and above all,  they looked like dogs with the same hair and faces.  They had changed biologically in every way.

Second research:  they took a group of fish and lowered the water level for them until they needed to walk rather than swim.  They became almost bipeds.  Their feet and bone structure changed and little by little they could live on land. They already had some capacity for breathing, however.  But in both cases we can see evolution at work, and at work rapidly.

Now let us look at us.  Early life in the womb begins to inform us about the world we live in, and more importantly, the world we can expect to live in.  And what do we do?  We begin to adapt; we change in every way.  If the mother is highly anxious and fearful, the boy can expect fear in his life and adapt to block  too much input.  He could be hyper to deal with that fear and danger and be wary and cautious at all times.  Other factors during that time will shape who he is.  If the mother who is carrying is highly depressed, the child may expect a sullen world, absent of joy and enthusiasm, who needs much stimulation to get going and seems motivation-less.  His physiology is low and slow, low body temp, blood pressure and heart rate.  He has been transformed into a biologic parasympath. (The parasympathetic nervous system will change its function and come to dominate). He will not be a self-starter; not because of heredity but because of what very early experience has done to change him.  It is the same principle with the fish and the wolves. Early experience does change us in many ways.  We become different.

Evolution should tell us that the same early experience that made wolves into dogs can make us into different kinds of human beings.  It governs our future behavior, our ideas and our possible illnesses.  Those rare humans reared in the jungle with no human contact do not learn to speak and react as we do.  We are pliable early on, so when the mother is a certain way while carrying, the child changes to adapt to this key early environment.  And that adaptation remains in force for life.  We are learning how to get along, how to live with others, whether to be afraid or suspicious, whether to approach or retreat.  We have learned what kind of world we can expect and be ready for it.  Only that may not be the way the world really is; only a different version of it. And so one maladapts, living out his past world in the present; also called “neurosis”. He misinterprets because his view of the world is very skewed.  And his physiology becomes neurotic too, to accommodate his early warped life.  Allergies, high blood pressure, migraines are some of the results we see; and we change when we return to those early months.  We don’t necessarily have an awareness of these depths but they are dredged up as we plunge deeply into the brain and its depths; a process known as resonance. Where each brain level is connected to a higher level, each level sharing information in its own "patois" to levels above.  That is how feelings become transformed into ideas.  Feelings await the development of the neo-cortex before provoking ideas, just as happened in ancient evolutionary times. Once ideas are in place that can be suffused and altered by feelings.  We don’t speak English, we speak feelings that long ago predated English.  We give those feelings a name.

My point in all this is that pain and healing are one.  We cannot have healing without the pain laid down very early in the development of consciousness. Those who have never had that experience, which is most of us, will never know who lies deep inside.  That means that those doing psychotherapy will never plumb the depths necessary for healing. If we want to be whole we must bring all levels of brain function, all levels of consciousness together.  I am not sure that we can make dogs into wolves again, but happily, we can go back and be what we were meant to be if we visit ancient times and ancient levels of consciousness.  Despite Mindfulness and other such nonsense, the neo-cortex alone can never get us there.  It wasn’t designed to reach deep into our biology.  Mental tricks are just that, tricks to fool our system. They do not endure  and make no permanent changes.  They are games perpetrated in lieu of proper scientific therapy.  It is not the memory of pain I am discussing, but the experience of it. That experience is deep inside us.  It will not come to us, except for the use of LSD; we need to meet it; to travel downward and feel what lies there waiting to get out and be liberated.  And the minute we experience it we at the same time liberate it.  What a relief!