consider

Consider for a moment that you are not who you think you are. Not that we know and you don’t, but simply that as humans our innermost thoughts, feelings, motivations, and identities — our selves — are far more than our conscious minds alone. Cogito ergo sum largely misses the point. The part of you that is reading these words, for example, is only a very small of your brain, and an even smaller part of your self, and very far from being in control of the way you live your life.

We are incredibly complex organisms, perhaps best understood as a bodymind of which conscious thought is an important part, but nowhere near the defining feature. We have known for centuries that even seemingly abstract thought has a physical substrate; our brains, after all, are biological organs. We also know that we have brains in our hearts and guts, which process and transmit information quite differently from our head-brain, without any clear hierarchy established between the three. But recent studies of fungi, plants, and slime molds suggest that intelligence is no way exclusive to neuronal activity. It seems quite reasonable, and coherent with lived experience, to consider that our bodies have their own form of intelligence, far older, and in some ways more powerful than the mental activity with which we tend to identify ourselves.

So it might be more useful to think of ourselves as something less fixed, less rational, and less ordered than we would probably like to believe. Imagine your existence as a brief flash of life suspended between two eternities; a life formed by the continual interplay between the twin forces of consciousness and being, both of which are expressed through your body and your mind; imagine yourself as a sort of energetic flux, something like the interaction of rebounding ripples caused when somehow a pebble of consciousness was dropped into the pond of being. What if, as ancient tantric texts teach us, the highest expression of our being is a deeper, more vibrant consciousness? What if the highest expression of our energy is love? 

Whatever the case may be, it makes little sense to identify solely with the mind or the body, or to place one above the other. When it comes to understanding ourselves, and to living fully, the arrows of causality seem to point in every direction. 

At primal nature we are dedicated to getting at the heart of what it means to be a human. Not just with abstract understanding, but with real lived experience. Understanding is good, and necessary, but it’s far from enough. We also need to move and breathe and express ourselves freely; we need to work our way down to the source of our energy, learn how to nurture and harness it; then, slowly, consciously, build ourselves back up into something far more powerful and authentically ourselves, than we ever were before.

the roots of human experience

Consider that as living beings our most deeply ingrained instincts are simply more complex iterations of the same electromagnetic impulses that literally hold us together: attraction and repulsion.

Like all forms of life, from bacteria to beech trees, we too can be defined by our propensity to move toward that which we sense will nourish us and move away from that which we sense will do us harm.

A few million years down the line, many of us animals developed our capacities further with the development of the limbic brain, where we register emotions. Thus, from pain and pleasure we evolved fear and desire, and all their countless derivatives like anger, sadness, or elation, that largely dictate the quality and texture of our lived experience. Your emotions feel unique and personal, and in some sense they are; but they are also only a slightly more complex version of the same basic set of reactions — essentially attraction and repulsion — that all living beings share.

Relatively recently, we as humans developed even further, with the prefrontal and cerebral cortexes, gaining the ability to translate these corporeal and emotional processes into more complex sensations like worry, hope, or doubt; even the seemingly abstract processes such as imagination, analysis, and calculation could be said to derive from these same basic instincts.

If you dig deeply enough into any any thought you have, any decision you make, or emotion you feel, its apparent uniqueness or mystery begins to dissolve when you realize that it just another way to bring you somehow closer to what you sense will nourish you, and further from what you sense will do you harm. The way that we experience the world in virtually every detail is shaped by our fundamental limbic patterns of processing fear and desire, and given its intensity by the way our bodies and brainstems process our pain and our pleasure.

This is why all of the work we do at primal nature begins by transforming our relationship to stimuli along these two fundamental axes of experience. We move through the fundamental experiences of pain and pleasure, transforming automatic reactions into conscious processes; in body, sensation, emotion, and thought, we replace fearful judgment with acceptance, compassion, and eventually love.

No matter what the level of complexity at which you want to understand or optimize or reshape yourself, experience has shown us that this is the best place to start. This is by far the most powerful and effective way that we can transform our relationship to the world around us, and more importantly to ourselves.