A Personal Inquiry into the Science of Everyday Living and the Roots of Human Passion, Understanding and Satisfaction
1. Sustaining Life - Essential connections
2. Making Meaning - Thoughts that connect
3. Knowing and Doing - The cognitive circle
4. Beyond Thought - Spiritual awareness
5. Conversation Networks - The cultural connection
6. Passion and Enthusiasm - The drive to connect
7. Understanding and Agreement - The emotional connection
8. Loss and Grief - Connections lost
9. Addiction - Chains that bind
10. Stress and Disease - Inhibiting connections
11 Music and Colour - The beauty of connection
12. Honouring the Flow - Sustaining connection
When I look around my world, I feel both joy and fear. Sometimes, I am inspired by the optimism and excitement I notice in others. At other times I feel concerned that so many people seem unhappy and deeply dissatisfied with their lot. I experience both these extremes myself from time to time, but often it is the rather boring middle ground that affects me most. Who could deny that much of our living is spent in a bland and empty, in-between sort of existence, making do the best we can, largely indifferent to the daily news of yet more killing and environmental degradation, narrow escapes from death and even narrower margins of winning and losing - always winning and losing. We are responsible people in many ways, yet we may be acting irresponsibly about some things that really matter if we do not look at what are the essential qualities of life that most affect our future existence. My fear is that our children may not be able to enjoy the quality of life even that we have today, unless we examine the way we live today.
Our science and technology is very advanced, but what does it have to tell us that explains anything about our quality of life? I read on the internet a note about the irony of progress:
We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers; wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints; we buy more, but enjoy it less; we have more conveniences, but less time; more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgement; more leisure, but less fun; we have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values; we have learned well how to make a living, but not how to make a life.
Biology, the science of life, has given us the principles of modern medicine and nutrition for healthy bodies and spawned a psychology that provides some tools to deal with upset minds, but it has barely touched the real issues of how we experience day-to-day living and why we feel and behave the way we do. The biological roots of human passion, understanding and satisfaction are not explained by this science at all. Ordinary living experience, which commonsense tells us we would want to know about more than anything else, has been virtually ignored by life scientists. It is perhaps too mundane for the hi-tech, essentially manipulative culture of the scientific breakthrough. Frankly, it has also proved too difficult to tackle using the traditional scientific approach.
But science is changing; at least there are new developments which contain the promise of better opportunities to examine the dynamics of our feeling states, the subtlety of our relationships, the sources of our dissatisfaction. This new science is only a very quiet revolution and certainly cannot be claimed to be a guide to 'living happily ever after,' but it offers hope for all those who yearn for some immediate improvement in our prospects. One does not need to become a convert or a guru to explore this science. It can be tried on for size and then worn if and where it fits. Nor do we need to reject the traditional scientific method that has served us so well in many ways. The new science could sit comfortably alongside the old, as an adjunct and an ally. I have to say that there are many traditional scientists who do not accept this view at present, but there are also many who do.
This book is about the developments in biological science which offer us a new understanding of the living state, the essential qualities of life; of what it is to be human, alive and aware of the living world around us. From biological principles arise the most useful philosophical deliberations about freedom of choice, free will and what influence we have through our actions, thoughts and dreams. There is a basis in biology for human ethics and decision making which has not previously been explained in the language of everyday living.
What specific ills does this address? Problems of human relationship take many different forms and truly effective communication that could mend these problems is remarkably rare. At the global level, international cooperation is concerned with power and control, not with harmony and goodwill. At the social and personal levels there is also much conflict and confrontation, rather than listening and understanding. Financial greed and abuse of power such as sexual crimes done to children still occurs to an extraordinary degree despite being exposed as evil more openly than ever before. Substance addiction seems ever increasing. Stress and dissatisfaction is widespread in our places of work and these lead to diseases that have not yet been conquered. One way of addressing these issues is too look at the nature of everyday living and communication or how it is that we are interconnected.
Why is it that so many of us feel trapped and apart - cut off from one another and from the world around us? Acknowledging our alienation from nature requires more than simply taking an ecological world view because it arises from our everyday living as individuals, not from the policies of governments and corporations.
So what exactly is the problem? Like the Greek god, Janus, it has two faces: fragmentation and monoculture. Our society is fragmented and we feel isolated due to a history of increasing disconnection, but at the same time, there is a craving to eliminate diversity and produce uniformity (a false togetherness). Both these trends are unnatural; both are contrary to biological principles that ensure the continuity of life.
Science is our principal means of taking things apart and cultivating this desire to hone in on the supposedly best part, casting aside the less desirable bits, but I hope that an emerging science of wholeness, which has links with spirituality, may also help to reveal the folly in this.
I am not a prophet, nor an evangelist. My story is a personal exploration of the way biological science might help us to live together more successfully than we do today. I see the world as a biologist who has lived long enough to be personally acquainted with many of the vicissitudes of life and who shares with a host of other people a concern about the future quality of life for humankind. This is not just another book about the importance of ecology and conservation, nor is it simply a self-help guide to becoming healthy, wealthy or wise. It is about the nature of human behaviour: where it is getting us into serious trouble and where it points to a better future in which the essential qualities of life will be conserved and consolidated for our children.
From a biological viewpoint, our very survival depends on the connections we make, as living organisms, with the medium in which we live. This is relatively simple to demonstrate and explain in scientific terms. It is obvious that we do not exist in isolation, separated from the air and food and other living things that surround us. More subtle is the viewpoint that our wellbeing, including personal satisfaction, happiness and peace of mind, and our social and environmental outcomes, are also dependent on the quality and kind of connections that we make.
In order to explain this idea we will need to consider the existence of a biological hierarchy of connections from the most basic elements of sustenance to the highest reaches of mind or thought or spirit, whatever you prefer to call it. This hierarchy is an extension of an explanatory framework that is well established within the literature on psychology, spirituality and human science. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs is one of the foundations.
Thus we look first at the basic issue of sustaining life by means of certain essential connections (Chapter 1). Then we will consider how it is that we make meaning about anything by connecting our thoughts as well as our bodies (in Chapter 2) and the implications of this for our knowledge and our actions (in Chapter 3). Beyond thought there may be connections that result in a spiritual awareness (Chapter 4), with or without which the creation of our culture is the inevitable result of conversation networks (Chapter 5). The underrated drives of passion and enthusiasm (Chapter 6) and the often misunderstood biological mechanism of achieving understanding and agreement (Chapter 7) can then be seen in a new light. This leads to a fresh look at how we deal with loss and grief (Chapter 8), the many forms of addiction (Chapter 9) and the diseases that result from stress (Chapter 10). Finally, the science of wholeness is revealed most clearly through our experience of music and colour (Chapter 11) and this guides our exquisite ability to sustain all our connections by honouring the flow as a basic quality of life (Chapter 12).
