I set out to obtain as much knowledge as possible, hoping to create a set of practical ethical values and morals, in anticipation of a more purpose driven and meaningful life. In a world where it is difficult to justify religious beliefs and the only realities appear to be the laws of physics and mathematics, the task has become more difficult than ever before. After many years travelling around the world working as a vet and living in different countries I have developed a simple set of rules and beliefs as an aid to a healthier, happier and more meaningful life. I would like to share these values with the hope of making the world a safer and happier place, starting with you and me.
Introduction
We will only discover a happy life under conditions of total freedom—Freedom from fear of rejection, poverty, suppression, death and our own ambition. In other words, complete freedom from objective fixations, including the mind itself. Through this detachment, we obtain pure love and understanding. Add to this an understanding of a higher purpose for our presence here, and we are enlightened
The idea of biological replication and its proposed desperate drive to mutate, adapt and survive must surely be more than just a senseless mass seeding of DNA. In fact, from a relative point how do we define ‘survival’; and from a more philosophical viewpoint why is it so highly regarded?
To some entirely lost in the evidence-based scientific view of the world, these issues may seem either too trivial or perhaps too unrewarding to be a worthy pursuit. For others perhaps more sceptical about the confines of objective science, and what religion or perhaps philosophy has to offer, it may come as a refreshing alternative.
In brief, physics sets the boundaries of the universe supported by objective evidence—evidence mainly found in the basic elements and an ongoing discovery of new energy forces, this then expressed mathematically. In turn, in the natural sciences, our foundations are more equivocally based on DNA and genetic coding; changes in organisms accounted for as adaptations to environmental stimuli. Technocrats are designing computers and machines with the aim to simulate human activity and behaviour mechanically and electronically. Driving research in all these progressive fields is principally an out of control financial machine with the focus on profits.
In an era of computerization and extreme, at times cruel materialism, ‘reality’, vehemently set by genetic and financial limitations can be daunting. Marketed as computerised statistics and with information overload on every imaginable topic it can be, to say the very least, become confusing. In healthcare materialism now extends, but does not limit itself to longevity medicine for the rich, with its’ other extreme acceptance of basic nutritional deficiencies, substance abuse, mental health issues and infectious diseases in the poor taking a distant second place.
Add to this the fact that we are living on a planet with potentially dwindling water and food supplies and climate change, increased prevalence of natural disasters, religious fanaticism, terrorism, acidification of oceans, deforestation, accumulation of nitrogen and phosphorous waste to a growing list, what an overwhelmingly fearsome place the world must seem to a new generation.
Natural selection theory (the selfish, greedy and ‘senseless’ DNA) with a survival of the fittest strategy seems to be the logical and sensible conclusion to explain our origins and most of us aggressively and without much thought jump into its hierarchical mayhem. Most conventional religions offer fleeting alternatives for the desperate, creating no more than self-interested segregation, secured in egocentric rejection of others and their beliefs. Followers of theses religions justify suffering and inequality with the promise of a glorified special place in an afterlife or a burning inferno for the rest. Depressing as these facts already seem, the neglect of our mental health and sensory wellbeing is an added concern, and a mostly overlooked or completely ignored issue.
It is a sobering reality of our narrowly defined objective world that, as recent as the 1990s, scientists considered issues like pain in animals as rather trivial matters. With such an ignorant Cartesian view of life, we are now also oblivious to the poverty and suffering around us. Pre-occupied with material wealth and electronic and mechanised devices, we spend more time admiring the lifestyles of the rich-and-famous, involved with our own petty ambitions instead of concerning ourselves with the suffering of others. In fact, considering the current diversity of quality of life on our planet, we need to redefine suffering.
Before we do so a few reminders of how embarrassingly, slow sensory evolution has been for humankind:
Some examples—the church’s ignorance of a Copernican world, Platonic thinking in philosophy, not realising our animal origins, apartheid, eugenics, the misuse of nuclear energy, and mismanagement of natural resources and the current primitive fiscal system controlling life and creating a growing gap between the rich and the poor. To add fuel to the fire we tolerate an era of misinformation in marketing and corruption in our higher financial institutions with amazing calm.
In recent years, a new awareness, driven to protecting our Earth and addressing poverty and inequality is emerging, but as usual full of objective economic and political checks and balances; encumbering sense.
Humankind’s significant advances, be it in the sciences, the arts, or other fields, were all initially based on assumptions triggered by feelings. Such feelings, the liberating factor for the human mind from its solipsistic dull state.
Our inability to understand and pay heed to an emerging new sense could yet again pose to be a major obstacle in the next phase of our evolution.
We live in amazing times, advancing into a new universe. Set in the never before background of global internet access opinions, ideas and feelings now freely float around with the potential to make others aware, or more confused. Posted on the internet is anything from teenage social blogs to recent medical and scientific research papers, all this with the ability to simultaneously link millions of minds together. Minds, each in turn, connected with millions of neurons and with options to decide and elect what is worthy of assimilation.
Marketeers and business people tend to exploit what they can with this new marketing tool, principally for self-gain—misdirecting the human intellect. Politicians and the wealthy are fighting for control of this new media to gain more power, and of course for financial gain. Presented with such confusing and many times unproven information promoted by greedy marketing tactics and financially induced censorship, one has to often resort to feelings and sense to sift through useful information and mere gibberish.
In ensuring that such feelings have the opportunity to evolve soberly and sanely, the issue of mental health and ethics have also never been more urgent. We are ‘empowered’ by a new era of scientific achievement to a point where, if uncontrolled, we have the ability to, in extreme, destroy our entire planet by means of a nuclear war, or life itself by means of uncontrolled genetic manipulation. On a smaller objective scale, if we mess things up badly, we may create unimaginable suffering through unchecked development and greed. Such greed augmenting inequality and setting the background for revolution and war.
We should seriously ask ourselves, if this blink of intellectual empowerment is a mutative off-chance event driven by a selfish gene, or if this ability of self-destruction and global communication is not perhaps a new hallmark in the start of a more responsible, less egocentric and more benevolent era. Responsible action would involve all of us, regardless of race, culture, standing, or even species. Concerning ourselves with something as precious and urgent as our delicate future and mental-wellbeing, not only then become apparent as the key to solving the problems causing all the angst seen around us, but also the most important determinant of our destiny. It would be more than a revolt against the Darwinian cruelty still taken for granted around us, but it would also prove to be invaluable as the first step in setting Sense free in a new more enlightened period of our existence. In today’s world ‘senselessly’ ruled by a survival-of-the-fittest concept, we will have to be more proactive to change concepts kept in place by misinformation and false marketing, ferociously driven by an unflinching money machine.
Objective science, under the influence of narrowly set financial confines, were (and to some extent still is) very much the cause of this ignorance towards animal and human suffering—perhaps the growing acceptance of euthanasia as a ‘treatment’ option. As a reminder of man’s limitations, we should historically go back to Descartes almost 400 years ago. His objective views and endeavours to understand the human body became well embedded in our thinking. As a respected philosopher, he convinced the church to see the human body and spirit as complete and separate, promising not to interfere with the mental and spiritual realm that belonged to the church. This split between mind and body sadly and embarrassingly has set the pattern of thought in scientific and medical thinking ever since. Interestingly he went further to lay claim that the pineal gland was the seat of the human soul and therefore only people had souls, and not animals, resulting in vivisection that continued for centuries. Embarrassingly, in his lifetime he had to admit that animals also have a pineal gland, but still declined their sense of pain.
This objective construct (although a significant part of our mental advancement), firmly created a wall between the mental and physical causing much of the neglect of animal and human mental welfare. Such is the sleepwalking existence of man.
It is equally troubling to know that it was only after the war in the late 1940s that the tiny profession of psychology was established, driven by a need to cater for the mental scars of post-war veterans. Sadly, we needed a war to maim and kill in order to trigger a more concerted interest in the mental welfare of our own species.
Psychiatry, the other main caretaker of our mental health (although it existed in name as early as 800 A.D. in the Islamic world and in Hebrew times), became more of an academic pursuit with little to offer therapeutically than homes for the mentally ill until recent years. Confronted by a limited number of treatment options to alter the mind, lobotomies were a common treatment option as recent as the late 1970’s. Our deleterious objective approach, to if something is dysfunctional to ‘cut it out’ and get rid of it.
Amazingly, the most important aspect of our existence has received the least of our attention and understanding, and is still generally left as an afterthought to the objective body. Armed with this underrated enigmatic organ we make all our decisions and judgments. It also became more apparent that our mental health depends heavily on addressing the quality of life in others, including our fellow creatures.
In veterinary medicine the principle criteria used as recently as 1981 was pure objective science, and in agriculture it’s still ongoing today, affecting production efficacy. The guidelines are mostly set using efficiency of food use and reproduction, with mortality and morbidity worked into the equation only as threat to production efficiency. Most of science and health care, augmented by today’s technocratic society, still blindly follow such restrictive objective values.
We should thus take care, after our explorations and analysis, not to end up with the same inconclusive objective and technical barriers when dealing with feelings, pain, and suffering. Intertwined in all objective pursuits is inescapably the enigma of life, with all its complex diversity and richness based on feelings and sense. This we should give much more credit.
All this potential awe-inspiring benevolence demands a progressive new view, detached from pure objectivism, greed, and the idea of an aimless selfish DNA. Needed is, a more benign and inspiring philosophy. Set in a deceivingly ordered computerised world we now need a new set of ethics and morals, with no egoistic motives, to re-enchephalize humankind—free form greedy politics, economic bias or restrictive religious beliefs.
Why we are here and how are we supposed to live a good, honourable and pure life, and why should we? For our purpose, we discuss this under three main subunits:
I. Higher purpose (cerebral)—without a reason for our existence this sentence would end right here, we would have no awareness of 1 +1 = 2 and we may as well stop harping on about the meaningless of it all. We can therefore safely assume there is a higher purpose. The proof is the fact that we are here and constantly changing. We can continue to debate if the higher purpose has any purpose or not, the futility of this speaks for itself.
II. Calculative (limbic)—the inner self; our ego. The mind objective, geared for survival, greed and hierarchical placement of ourselves in society—what gave us an evolutionary advantage and simultaneously made us conniving smart apes. This is also the damper on our evolutionary advancement. Most of us are entrapped in this stage and as a result suffer needless pain and illness; it is responsible for most of the crime and even war. Noteworthy is that ignorance of a higher purpose of our presence here we enhance our ego and create further entrapment in this intermediate stage of our sensory evolution.
III. Action (hypothalamic)—the basic somatic self (our basic anatomical and physiological self)
Simple changes in our perception and management of these three can make life complete, meaningful and less stressful.
Purpose
Chapter One
Higher Purpose
It was not the existentialists who killed God; it was God who killed God.
Definitions: (as used in human and veterinary medicine).
Suffering- an unpleasant emotional state or an undesirable mental state that people or animals would normally prefer to avoid. Suffering can refer to a wide range of intense and objectionable subjective states such as fear and frustration. It can be of either physical or psychological origin.
Pain- an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or is described in terms of such damage. The inability to communicate in no way negates the possibility that an individual is experiencing pain and is in need of appropriate pain relieving treatment.
To be purpose driven to survive and not suffer or be in pain, would be a rather pragmatic approach to defining life’s purpose. To be purpose driven to make money or obtain a higher education without well-defined goals also hardly suffices and the majority of us need a better purpose.
Seen as the highest evolutionary achievement in our known universe, there are two ways we can view human higher perceptive ability (our brain), the only means at our disposal to figure out the purpose for us being here.
A mutative off-chance event, with higher perception merely as a freak tool to improve survival. This option immediately limits our ability to do much more. As seedlings of a freak off-chance event, we were extremely lucky, and we have now reached the objective peak in our sensory evolution, we may even regress. We now have to rely entirely on natural selection and environmental changes to make minor adjustments over eons to come. We would most likely go extinct or maybe not.
Achievement of higher perception as the primary drive of evolution.
We have only started the initial stages of an amazing journey in a universe filled with infinite potential… our intellect and cognitive ability evolving explosively.
Why sensory advancement and global wellbeing is not only our ultimate purpose, but the only choice:
Key facts: The brain is the source of all suffering and pain, no one wants to suffer or be in pain.
From a universal point, all life is of equal importance, a single strand of viral DNA can wipe out vast numbers of humankind.
The excesses of some create suffering in others. Excessive individual wealth results in corruption, nepotism and protectionism. It furthermore results in manipulation of ethics and morals to mollycoddle the already powerful and rich. These excesses of a few, backed by unscrupulous marketing, also sets false values and aspirations in others. Survivalist strategies at the cost of others are not conducive to mental health or in fact survival.
The above facts seem easy to relate to but we tend to ignore them and as such their damaging effect on mental health. Furthermore, the above facts can only be justified under a Darwinian survivalist strategy, option (a).
Mindset that there is not enough to go around and fear driven by an antiquated economic system inflating shortages rather focusing on alternatives, it rewards the ‘haves’ at the cost of the ‘have nots’. Subsequently the latter have now become no more than cheap labour for the former. In a market driven economy with few jobs where a good day’s work may be worth less than the cost of needs to prepare dinner at the local grocer or a course of antibiotic tablets for your dog from the local vet, the rich have become extraordinary rich. These individuals take pride in their achievements making fortunes while they sleep or sit in a $1000 an hour spa, while the poor in many parts of the world work for $2 an hour. Even as staunch supporters of option (a) we have to admit, the rich are not necessarily the fittest or the smartest.
We have subsequently broadly stratified society into three sub-groups:
Homo sapiens supremus – an elitist group of firm believers in the superiority of their genetic makeup and achievements (or in some deserving of God’s special recognition), as the determents of their elevated position and lavish lifestyles. Many cheat, bribe and deceive in their attempts to belong to this group, subsequently reducing the average morality standards of its solipsistic driven members. Some just thank their lucky stars.
Homo sapiens comfortis¬¬¬¬¬ – The rather content and harmless middle class. Comfortable and secure, if not too busy complaining or pretending to be happy they dream about how good life would be in sub-group 1. With relative easy-acceptance of their safe place in this pretentious hierarchy, they are the easiest targets for unscrupulous marketeers. They are also the backbone of our society. ¬
Homo sapiens ignoramus— Ignorant, either due to an unfortunate genetic shortfall, bad luck or a self-created, drug-induced ignorant bliss. Due to their inability to part with much money, they are predominantly of use to the other classes to boost their egos, promote political images or do their dirty work.
With such a background we now have to create a purpose with a system of ethics and morals to satisfy the lot. For some of more enquiring mind we also have to create a system of beliefs to add meaning and purpose to life. An enormous task indeed—with science having determined reality, the existentialist having killed God (after the churches have already done a good job scaring people off), and worth measured in monitory terms. Military regimes are not very fashionable; although under current systems of democracy guns have been replaced with money.
With such an overwhelming task it can be easy to see how most failed entrants of sub-group (1) quickly accept their place in the scheme of things, or else fall victim to sub-group (3).
Either way, we are mortal beings with a limited lifespan, facing the reality of needing a purpose with ethics and morals to justify our stay here. We are inevitably again faced with the, possibly unrecognized impact on our existence here, of deciding between the brain as a freak event or an emerging goal directed sense.
In this search for meaning and purpose there has always been an undercurrent of awareness of something higher, something more meaningful than a struggle to survive or get rich quick. Some are quite happy to ignore issues like these since they appear to be of no value in their rather short objectively defined lives.
Others of more enquiring mind, or those lucky enough to have exhausted the pleasures of what money can buy, need something more. There is then a profound wish to dig deeper than religion and science (politics and economics being an unworthy pursuit for our purposes here).
In order to start somewhere we need to tap on all we can— ancient and present day religious wisdom, philosophical thinking and inevitably science. The task seems enormous but possible due a vast amount of duplication and cyclic activity in human thinking.
We start our search in China. Revived again today in modern-day China is Confucius’s ancient wisdom, where it has become especially popular amongst some Chinese intellectuals. This has enormous benefits to its populace in elevating moral standards in a new more democratic and capitalistic China where unchecked greed and capitalism has slowly planted its’ segregating roots (we in the West are already experts at this).
Confucius based the pillars of his wisdom and high morals in an ancient tale where humankind, bequeathed with the enormous task of pulling Heaven and Earth together, has to act wisely and with caution and care. Facing a new interconnected world narrowly defined by science, economics and politics, ‘freed’ to some extend from the confines set by some religions, it may never have been more applicable than now to intermingle Western and Eastern philosophical thinking in facing a very complex future. Tapping on both Western and Eastern philosophy has also never been more appropriate and practicable than in a more interconnected world as we have today, thanks to the Internet and air travel.
I found it fascinating during my travels and explorations to see how some people brought up under the influence of Eastern religious and philosophical thinking such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and others are grasping at wisdom and ideas in Western religion and philosophy. Likewise, we are all familiar with how in the West disillusioned individuals (we do not mention agnostics here, since they do not care anyway) are reaching for escape in Eastern religions and philosophical thinking. Many individuals on both sides have emerged from this with a ‘newly’ discovered enlightenment, satisfied with a new life and death formula. Inevitably, we have to ask ourselves if there is a common pattern here, and if so, how can we simplify and apply it.
Confucius continued and brilliantly exemplified a more open-minded wisdom centuries ago— “with only ambition (heaven) and no realism we are dreamers, with only realism (earth the objective) and no dreams we are plodders”. Clearly, either way, it can be seen we need move forward from another plodding phase of our existence, this time spiritually depraved and entrapped in a money driven technocratic society where God is dead and science our only guide.
The significance of revived Confucius and Zen thinking lies in its involvement with the detachment of sense from object. Almost simultaneously with this detachment comes the responsibility to utilise sense in an ongoing pursuit to amalgamate sense and object. From this it may already become evident to some the duplicity in Eastern philosophy and religion to detach form object –move outside the objective world and then be drawn back with more clarity of vision--enlightened.
Cause and effect is an obvious reality of life and the known universe, in science we call this evidence-based research. ‘A hot plate burns’, ‘water is wet’ (we do not need much more to prove this), ‘drug C causes such and such’, and so on. Ignoring a sense of awareness of a higher aspiration simply because it lacks objective evidence would in essence be as ignorant as burning a finger on a hot plate. Mathematics is an exact science with minor changes over time all the other sciences are constantly changed and adjusted based on new discoveries and advances.
How do we explain a current sense that something is amiss and a new more harmonious era is dawning, eradicating greed and poverty? Certainly, science and a better understanding of a material world cannot be where it begins or ends.
We have evolved the perceptive capacity to survive in the objective material world, all the way to now mapping the human genome, certainly not due to a freak chance genetic mutation or selective coding. If, on the other hand genetic coding is merely a selection process to create the fittest to survive, we have done pretty well, and passed our objective goal with the ability to destroy an entire planet. Based on current available knowledge and scientific evidence the Big Bang origin of our universe is the most acceptable and realistic explanation. We still have no idea why and how replicating DNA creating an organism to sense and perceive such things fit into the scheme of things.
We, based on all current evidence at hand, also now know how simultaneously unique, small and fragile we are in this scheme of things. We may be part of a bigger plan or maybe not. Ultimately, from where we stand and however many belief systems we want to create, it actually does not matter and we are the ultimate achievement. This is so unless we suffer from a serious case of self- refutation.
Under such a scheme, where higher perception (sense as I refer to it in this book) is our ultimate achievement ethical and morally guided living, become a lot more meaningful. Under such a system, we also cannot justify extreme wealth greed or poverty and any neglect of the weak and poor. The reason is that if we care for our higher Sense (unless this is undeveloped or diseased) we will not cause it to be neglected, in pain or suffering. We also from our understanding of science realise the interconnectivity of all, so selfish and egoistic living (see later chapters) are scientifically wrong (besides the ethics and morality involved).
A serious problem now arises if values are misconstrued and a few powerful people have the ability to control the masses and manipulate the rules driven by material gain. Religion has slowly been replaced by economics and science to determine values, perhaps forcefully perhaps due to destiny. In addition, lawyers of the powerful and rich, subject to their financial power, benefit from more available means to manipulate the rules than the poor masses. Never before in the history of humankind have we had a complex society governed by such blunt and archaic economics and materialism. Clearly, we blindly follow and worship option (a) and the meaninglessness of it all.
In order to explain, imagine a futuristic scenario, very likely to occur since the science is already in place. Genomics, nanotechnology and genetic engineering, to name but a few, new era advances in medicine that will benefit the wealthy.
With stem cell replacement therapy and genetic manipulation to fix damaged tissue, what an amazing new era of blissful painless living awaits some of our richer compatriots. However, to different ‘minds’ this will be of different value:
For Joe 2 the clone of Joe (the initial Joe Self), this is great news because after a promiscuous lifestyle and smoking for years he now develops lung cancer.
Joe Self on the other hand, raised by a Buddhist monk group was the sole survivor of a plane crash in Tibet. He move back to the West and dedicated his life to writing philosophical text and helping others through pure and healthy living. He is in good health, happy although financially considered poor.
Joe 2, considered a lucky and successful man, growing up with the odds against him as a cloned orphan can now afford the new stem cell replacement therapy on offer. He can do so after making a fortune selling off a pornographic website where you can meet your future dream date and invested it ‘wisely’ in a property soon to be developed for a new casino.
Under option (a), survivalist lucky events create winners and we can justify a successful, evolutionary winner in Joe2 (although not in agreement with many individuals’ moral values). He potentially has the means through his wealth to control many more and create jobs than the initial Joe Self. The above may even suggest there is a valid argument for cloning select genomes (the rich who can afford it) to expose their replicas to potentially more diverse environments.
We now face a philosophical dilemma. A cloned individual based on material gain has obtained a higher placing in the gene pool than the original pure form. Under our current ethical standards and moral values governed by material wealth, we can see how easy it is to accept Joe 2 as the evolutionary winner in the complex scheme of things. Clones may have biological flaws and with the potential to be cloned again can enhance biological disasters and restrict the natural selection process.
Delving a bit deeper in the above situation we can also argue that Joe 2 has employed many people in the new Casino (also destroyed many families and caused suffering in many), so he seems like a bit of an economical stimulant besides a genetic success?
Option (b) argument, a higher purpose, Jo Self is the winner. This is so because of his focus on developing the senses and morality. Furthermore, consider the casino property now turned into a park, open to all and available for spiritual escape and recreational needs; in a society where greed and excess is not highly valued. Jo Self has created spiritual awareness and healthy living through his simple lifestyle. He has given more to society than he has taken. Instead of fabricating a shaky base for addictive behaviour patterns driven by an enigmatic lust for more money, he set a less rapacious platform for people to improve their mental and physical wellbeing— also less dependent on material needs. No prizes for guessing who has created a better platform for an ethical and moral society to develop.
We all generally object to greed and self-gain at the cost of many, and consider it repulsive. So what drives this edacity?
Aggressive competitive behaviour is a genetically acquired trait needed for primeval survival—we should now confidently discard its use in civilised society. Ongoing competitive behaviour is of use only to obtain recognition in the group, to stand out and inflate one’s own ego. The marketing fraternity are experts at utilising this, driven by large paycheques from big industry. To stand out not only as a potential mate for breeding purposes, but to elevate one’s status when it comes to compete for food needed for survival. Alternatively, the motive is brash egoistical comfort seeking or fear. Such primitive recognition in the group is no longer of any use to society as a whole and has become a damper for future development; it may even be a threat to group safety. Elevating status based on wealth and property ownership as a creator of more access to power and freer lifestyle choices set false aspirations and created the platform for corruption, nepotism and greed. Everybody is and should be, born free. We can see how easy it is to lose the plot under such a system with the Confucian heaven slipping away. None of humankinds’ intellectual endeavours, our religions, sciences and philosophies, can ignore the fact that they are in search of a higher level of existence. In this way, we can sense the sagacity and motivation in our noble pursuit. Seen as driven by financial gain it loses acumen.
Therefore, we need to change the basis of our ethical design system to be less dependent on material gain and more preoccupied with mental wellbeing and spiritual gain. Under such a system, we also will reduce crime and greed.
The first step is simply to reject option (a) and accept the higher reason for our purpose here—to nurture advanced perception and sensory wellbeing on all possible levels.
II. The ‘soul’ problem:
The second problem we face in the context of immortality medicine is differentiation between life forms. Traditionally this is simple, there are the animals without souls and then there are us humans with souls. So what is a soul?
Objectively our pet cat shares 90% of our DNA. So a bit of reorganising of 10% of our DNA and we can become a cat! We will be able to do neat tricks but be minus a soul. In reverse, if we juggle a few genes around again we can turn our ‘cat us’ into a ‘human us’ and have a soul pop up as an added bonus? So objectively, a soul equates to a relatively minor DNA difference and it certainly is insulting to equate a minute DNA reshuffling to a soul based on tradition.
At this point, it should be rather obvious we have two choices. A soul is something we somehow acquire while we live as humans or it enters human life forms and leaves us again when die.
It is a rather pointless argument to enter into since the soul believers will rate it back to the biblical God created man with a soul, which can never be anything more than a belief without proof.
Furthermore, where shall we class a human foetus or vegetative-state human (Kant’s argument aside here)—with the animals or humans? If we now continue to exonerate only the clear- thinking, religious or hard working humans with societal worth to this deific state of possessing a soul, do some have more soul than others? Are select members with larger souls than others entitled to platinum cards with no limits, or do we just keep on dangling the old free entry to the Pearly Gates in front of them as an incentive?
Most likely, we’re just back where we started, in a separatist society with objectively determined values set in a Darwinian world, with its cruelty and wrongdoings. In this confusing world, where we can now grade worth (or soul), no animals qualify, since they lack soul. The chosen ones are all pietistic humans (let us hope for diversity’s sake that the opinion poll on this was run after the apartheid era) qualifying as decided by the Great Sense Decider, and his Rules are now elevated to divinity, with humans exempt from euthanasia, and promise a heavenly afterlife regardless of all the suffering and pain here on Earth.
We now naturally and anxiously beg, ‘Please, what are the rules, O Great Sense Decider, and, about my dog Hero? I know he’s a dog, but he saved my two-year-old daughter’s life by dragging her from a river after Billy the bully pushed her in.’
If the above argument sounds sarcastic and belittling to some, it vaguely served its purpose. Surely, we can see how senseless it is to get involved in empty arguments about human souls, afterlife, who qualifies and dogs having souls or not. Can we not, as clear-thinking humans, see the logic in sense? We evolved sense to perceive and survive; we exist in sense and in between, sense happens and flows undefinably and judiciously. Sense emanate in dogs, cats, tapeworms, and humans. Our divine duty lies in caring for and understanding this evolutionary rise of sense as we would for a newborn infant. Sense demands preservation and nurturing of life (all in which sense happens) and our responsibility lies in the abolishment of suffering, not ending a life and in empty promises of souls going to heaven.
Our thought patterns are set in this vastness of comparative nomenclature and classification of ‘things’ implanted by our educational system. Such minds, moulded by religion or objective thinking, are easy to emerge either confused or as mere ‘minimalists’, dogmatically sticking to and promoting a few hard-gained objective facts. Through the ages, it has also caused asphyxiation of some of our most brilliant minds, causing them to be embroiled in the confines of either religion or an objective world compelled to make money. With such a confusing background already set then (by our educational systems and churches), how can decisions about quality of life, morality and ethics become an unaffected universally accepted norm?
A simple and realistic platform would be to treat all life with equal respect and above all nurture, preserve and develop sense. Around this concept, it becomes more concrete to develop a set of moral values. Values that will not affect any life negatively and preserve sense by avoiding pain and suffering as previously defined. This concept can be extrapolated to everything from how we treat each other to industry
The mentioned emerging medical developments should serve as more examples to create awareness of the profound new era philosophical, ethical, and moral dilemmas we inevitably will have to face in the background of healthy mental development. With the likelihood of immortality medicine and euthanasia in the context of genetic ‘fitness’ and species differences—we can sense our urgent duty to assimilate more than objective facts in such matters.
The veterinary profession, well versed in performing euthanasia, may soon be the first to confront the issue of cloning pet animals, since the market will be very attractive to entrepreneurs once the basic science (already there) is marketable. The reason for animals possibly becoming the first beneficiaries of such forms of new era ‘medicine’ is because we still carry with us the Cartesian view of animals having no ‘soul’. Furthermore, the business fraternity is anxiously awaiting the marketing value of potential of expensive and popular clones
Again to highlight a few philosophical issues in the interest of our coming quest:
If we clone, whom shall we clone, the gifted, the highly moral, the wealthy, or quite likely, as mentioned initially the beloved pets of the wealthy based on affordability? If we had cloned Beethoven (the composer, not the dog in the movie) would he still be a gifted musician today and how many of his clones would be around? Possibly not.
What impact will time and space have on the clone? What is the effect of repeatedly cloned genetic material to changing environments? How many times shall we allow the same individual to have his ripped-out calf muscles replaced by stem cells?
Is our concern with immortality and longevity merely an offspring of our blind objectivity—option (a) existence?
In the context of interconnectivity, feelings, and fragile species interdependency, think of your fifty-five kilogram Rottweiler, Brutus, play-wrestling with you, knowing full well it could rip your throat out if it wanted to. If on your doorstep one day arrives the ‘new’ clone of the few cells taken by the vet from Brutus some years ago, will you immediately go and play-wrestle with him again? Of course not.
Think of your daughter on the back of a pony, gently walking along, sensing its vulnerable load. They, the animals, and we humans feel secure in the above situations, so how do we feel about immortality and what do we sense we would want from it if it was for sale? Do we want Marley the dog’s being (soul) to continue or for her body objective to persist indefinitely as a clone? From the above the urgent need for all of us to think (sense) and philosophy in a societal way—beyond the objective world and its limitations are apparent.
After eons of evolutionary ‘adaptations’ our physiology is fine-tuned to keep us alive, creating a delicate interdependency between us, our environment and each other. Thanks to science, we now know that ages of natural selection and genomic adjustments have made us adapt and survive changing environments, but for what reason?
When a single cell adapts and acquire the ability to survive, we consider it a biological success. If one was to be, let us say a pancreas in a dog, from an evolutionary standoff this fragile and shaky coexistence has been a fair trade-off for the organ seen as a conglomerate of cells. Taken into account the sanctuary that a body had given its cells with the chance to surrender other cellular functions and to reside unhindered in our bodies. Seen differently, in a delicate way it assisted her survival as an organ within an organism. More dramatic and scary for us however, should this organ and its’ cells become cancerous or diseased we may die.
In the context of such a dilemma due to a ‘minor’ organ failing, I cannot help but realise the insignificance of man but simultaneously the extraordinary significance of all life forms.
Let us prematurely assume in the new era of biotechnology a computerised system will calculate a scoring system for quality of life and euthanasia has become commonplace.
Imagine yourself to be in the doctors’ waiting room busy dying of pancreatic carcinoma (a malignant cancer):
‘As you sit waiting for your results you are aware of the calm serenity in the room, mainly achieved by means of the carefully selected furnishings and décor. An ominous austerity prevail besides all the objective attempts to mask it and the robotic attempts by efficient and well-trained staff to show compassion to customers. In the distance, a hum of the computer- machine deciding my continued existence was ominously audible.
The score delivered by the Termination Machine, and now confronting me, was 93/100 (cut off is 90/100) and the scoring criteria carefully explained by the booklet in front of me.
The computer ‘considered’ the following categories and sub-categories with updated software (backed by recent advances in the field) in arriving at the score:
Quality of Life to Self:
Pain score, further sub-categorized and completed by competent physician-
Mental health, further sub-categorized and completed by psychologist /psychiatrist-
Financial status or support/ ability to afford treatment (documents reviewed)-
Family support if any (completed by family members)-
Ability to be self- dependent/pre- filled out questionnaire social worker guided-
Patient’s personal opinion and willingness to continue existing in this state-
Quality of Life –Societal context:
Ability to function in a profession, position, work or contribute to society-
Demand for this service-
Cost of ongoing medical and supportive treatment-
Potential of a new cure related to statistical survival time-
Value as a study case with future benefit to society-
Threat to society-
In conclusion, on failing to sign in acceptance and agreement with the above determents for an appointment with the Termination Machine, another form was waiting with a list of liabilities, indemnities and exclusions from ‘normal’ society; listed equally lucidly and waiting less eagerly for a signature.’
So in view of the above where lies the difference between Marley the dog (an organism), us (an organism) and the pancreas (the organ)? The objective difference can be found in another organ, Marley’s brain, able to make decisions and assessments of the outside world and to move through it by differentiating safety from danger. However, more importantly, the difference lies in its ability to sense and express emotions—to be happy when her owner comes home and sad if left alone—feelings and emotions as a non-objective link. If the brain is unwell what then?
Objectively life can dependent on a small organ such as a pancreas, in sense our interconnectivity is vastly more complex than we daily perceive. It prompts us to respect and acknowledge this delicate interconnectivity, not only as support to some higher transmorfiguration, but also because we share it and depend on it in all levels of life. Option (b) and not (a) clearly function in this higher sense. Once we grasp this ubiquitous interconnectivity in our objective world through sense as a higher and purpose driven goal it will guide us to respect not only each other more, but sense as an august achievement of eons of ongoing evolutionary struggle. Something we should preserve and protect at all cost.
Realising such a pattern of delicate interdependency, striving for advancement sense will reinforce awareness of interdependency, helping us emerge into an unimaginably blissful new future. Life, free of religious, financial, and political stratification or the obligations set by objectivism in its well-defined and narrow confines. This unanimous and selfless search of sense, the ultimate drive of DNA; not merely objective survival in a solipsistic DNA with replicating genes hoping for diversification. Evolving sense is not a means to an end but the ultimate and yet incomplete end to a means. If not clear why, it should become clear as we continue our journey, hopefully in sense under option (b).
Is there some meaningful design other than the relatively objective gain of DNA replication with the chance to genomic variation (as promoted by natural selection theorist) to our existence and being? How are we supposed to live a meaningful life, and are the present values set by our society good guidelines?
Religion and years of scientific reading and studying have sadly failed to supply all the answers to the question: what is this life? Is there an arrangement that has been present throughout the ages? Staunch academics have now boldly rejected the Grand Design theory at the expense of (better supported by objective data) Natural Selection. This support is objectively substantiated by the discovery of the DNA helix and major advances in gene mapping in recent years.
Absolutists and relativists, realists and idealists, objectivists and subjectivists, black and white, poor and rich, scientific and unscientific, awake and asleep, conscious and unconscious, well and unwell, happy and sad, failure and success, receiving and giving, surplus and famine, alive and dead. Are our minds simply geared to make sense of such comparative objective values merely as a tool for objective categorisation in a hierarchical society struggling to survive (and is this life?), or are these hidden feelings much more than what the primitive objective values at our disposal present them as? Are all such relative values set just to find a niche in the hierarchy of the gene pool of natural selection or something much more profound? Besides recording such objective differences for survival or self-recognition, what does my mind do? What is mind? What is being? Why are we sad about losing a loved one?
With all intermingled and with cognition fluctuating in and out of objective extremes, we can either become completely entrapped in trying to define ourselves under the constraints of such guidelines, or be set free enough to fully grasp for the first, time the being in the object and the sense in being. Involving ourselves with objective differences all around us in our search for conformity, ultimately reveals a cyclic pattern of interconnectivity, not divergence. All of us also urgently cry out for something more than the harsh objective reality of failure and success, beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty as presented by our primitive Darwinian origins.
Objective values simply fail to satisfy or impress the mind other than creating a sense of fear of loss and belonging. The reason for this is because we’re slowly drowning in objectivity and missing the goal completely! We’re identifying our being with the objective with the aim of boosting our self-esteem and finding a place in the hierarchy of the gene pool. We miss seeing this as merely a self-esteem evolved to establish ourselves as proof of our usefulness to the community and to be part of this ‘buzzing’ interconnectivity in search of sense. With this approach, the I (me) merely is an object amongst objects and the mind so easily gets lost in this concept that it forgets its more august place in the scheme of things—evolution of sense under option (b). So, what is this sense (explained in chapter IV on sensory evolution), and how you (the reader), and I fit into all of this?
How can we not be concerned?
As a practicing vet responsible for the healthcare of all sentient beings other than man the responsibility, if nothing else we carry is enormous. We also perform more legal euthanasias on sentient beings than any other profession. It serves as a vital link between the desperate outcries of addressing issues affecting, besides the traditional physical (objective) health, also the sensory wellbeing of all creatures around us. It breaks barriers between species when dealing with pain and suffering, acting as a witness to emotional suffering on both sides of the species barrier. It also serves to show how discomposingly shameful it is if we cannot address the human need for harmonious interconnectivity and mental health. Fixation and entrapment in objectivity is the primary cause of this neglected care of the ‘sense’.
Veterinarians, traditionally responsible for the physical wellbeing of all creatures, should be careful not to fall victim to Cartesian values by splitting mind, ignoring sense and the interconnectivity of all. We should all urgently involve ourselves with the mental wellbeing of our farm and pet animals and not ignore lessons learnt from the past. We should furthermore attune ourselves to the carers of these pets and their mental health. As witnesses to the human-animal bond and in realising the limitations of objective data (more on this in chapter II) we should pay urgent heed to search for ‘something’ we sense and know is lacking. This sense of the missing (or the missing of sense) in between the objective is what should urgently be explored and given all the care it requires.
This concept of sensing the mind was first brought to light, albeit amidst some confusion, by none other than aforementioned philosopher, Descartes. Denying the reality of our existence for a while, entrapped in mind and an objective world, he concluded one day and subsequently stated, “I think, therefore I am”. Essentially his revealing discovery boiled down to (after spending some years doubting his existence) that if he doubted (thought), he couldn’t be doubting his existence without existing (as a doubter or thinker that is). Affirmation of sense? Today more likely like most of us he may have concluded, “I have stuff, therefore I am”.
“Why are we here?” has challenged most of humankind at some point as far as memory goes back. Perhaps as responsible caretakers of enhancing sense?
To emphasize our ignorance on this topic, I recall a well-respected and distinguished professor of philosophy, enlighteningly on the animals’ side, and his response to a lecture presented by a prominent pain physiologist in the late 1970s.
In brief, the pain physiologist, after an hour of relying objective electrochemically recorded data and their interpretation thereof, claimed that due to “different electrochemical activity in the neurocortex of the dog it did not feel pain the way humans do”.
The philosophy professor’s rebuttal was the shortest in his career and went as follows. He simply asked, “As a prominent human pain physiologist, you do your work on dogs and then extrapolate your work to humans, correct?”
The physiologist in an erudite manner replied, “Yes”.
Our philosopher replied in his only response, “Excellent. Then either your statement is false or your life’s work is”. Mental Health and Wellbeing in Animals (Franklin D McMillan 2005).
It is easy to see why doubts regarding objective science can start early during studies in these fields.
Why is life, with a knowledgeable force or God in charge, at times such a cruel and ‘meaningless’ business with a then undignified and painful end? The age-old query, directly challenging God’s existence, omnipresence, ‘his’ fairness, and ’ethics’. Are there still some individuals who seriously believe that we as humans are blessed to selectively and divinely deny or deliver relief from such pain, based solely on our materialistic hierarchical views of the world and, in failing to do, so leave it to God or just ignore it? Blinded by materialism, it is perplexing to know that only in the last decade did the veterinary profession sense the need of applying proper pain relief to animals and we are only just starting to address their other sensory concerns.
I submit a case of a patient seen a few days ago, presented to me due to an intense and sorrowful crying of unknown origin. Endless blood tests and imaging procedures were conducted, with all the objective values being normal. A complete neurological assessment was done and found to be normal. The medical history didn’t reveal any reason for causing this woeful howling. Cognitive dysfunction was ruled out based on the age of the dog.
Based on current practice and present studies, a diagnosis of severe anxiety was made. The treatment, today a commonly used serotonin reuptake inhibitor sertraline (better known as Zoloft), cured this patient from its sorrowful behaviour. Objective science, treating an emotion in a compatriot being, only a few years before had declined the right to an emotional existence and being. With no inclination whatsoever to promote Zoloft or similar drugs (rather limited and primitive precursors of what we could have available soon) I saw this patient some weeks later markedly improved, with a happy owner.
All our endings, based on our present (but still developing) sense of interpretation about life and what affects this baffling arousal of sense and being are purely objective. Does awareness of our presence and sense outside our objective body continue to exist? Unfortunately, we have to die to find out. Since I have had no return-from-the-dead experiences and the book continues, it appears obvious that I have not put this to test.
Facing a world objectively equipped with sense organs and a nervous system sensing only a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum (that we can relate to) we cannot vaguely imagine where our sensory evolution can and still will take us. However, we do have to liberate our senses to grasp this possibility of omnipresent sense (free from body and mind objective) more fully. I prematurely urge readers and thinkers to reject the idea of objective evolutionary biologists talking in terms of homo sapiens having reached its evolutionary ‘limits’ based on population intermingling of genes. Some even go as far as proposing absurdities such as isolating population groups being more conducive to genetic diversification and our future evolutionary success. In what sense I ask—to promote stratification, to cause more wars and poverty, to boost survivalist strategies perhaps?
We need to remind ourselves and our present-day thinkers, leaders, and philosophers of the limitations as set by our objective evolutionary origins. However, we have to question the possibility of the unimaginable in a vast universe of multitude for ALL, driven not by genomic adjustments from time to time, but by a sensible subconscious re-enchephalization of our species in enhancement of sense. Why so? Because we have feelings and are dependently interconnected to all that exists and does not exist, through sense.
No man or animal can claim superiority over another without surrendering to this basic interconnectivity and a drive to sensory advancement. Once surrendered there is no superiority, since superiority is objective and can merely exist ‘senselessly’ and isolated in this interconnected sense. Not separate or placed in any hierarchy, but inescapably and non-objectively caught in it. No beginnings, no ends—just sense and its continuous strive for advancement.
All progress is based on initial assumptions (sense), to only later be authenticated (or not) by objective facts and then queried again. All our doings in-between is merely noting and recording of individualistically interpreted objective data (our opening argument), until sense happens again. In veterinary medicine, and in human medicine to a lesser extent, our truths regarding euthanasia are arrived at by the emotional impact of the quality of life in the ‘terminally’ ill, often financially driven. We then enter a precarious field guided by either pure objectivity or sentimentality in coping with feelings and emotions, or a combination of these. This prompts us yet again to confront this end-stage suffering in a life filled with fear and uncertainty.
Is this a last ‘kick in the behind’ for the weak in a Darwinian sense? Are we doctors ‘granted permission’ by our evolutionary acquired objective stand in society to perform this life ending ‘relief’ act of euthanasia on life forms? Alternatively, like all else in today’s world, is the dollar standing domineeringly behind us. What criteria should we use and what happens if we extrapolate such criteria to ourselves?
I have often had pet owners, witnessing the euthanasia of a pet due to severe suffering and terminal illness, state how they wish their elderly father or mother suffering from untreatable disease (normally cancer) could have gone the same way. What about the impact on the mental health of a sensitive individual having to decide on ending a life? What if we could instead just patch her up with a few stem cells and keep doing so indefinitely? What if her owner went through the same patching up processes and stayed around indefinitely?
How do we create space for the children and new puppies, do we just hang around with ‘patched up’ old folks and geriatric dogs with booming markets in longevity medicine? Imagine the disc-space needed to store infinite medical records.
Is it not more ‘acceptable’ to improve our sensory awareness under guidance of a morally improved socioeconomic system? Torn between mindless objectivity on the one side and emotion and feelings on the other we are filled with equivocal challenges, with euthanasia always subconsciously acting as an escape route.
Objecthood (materialism), introduced soon after birth in all of us by fearful parents and teachers, is rigorously enforced throughout our education. It serves as a deficient and poor guide through life. I have to euthanize Marley the dog since she is suffering, right? I’ve given the owner the option to leave her on a morphine drip until she passes away (dies, why do we avoid this word so much). Her lying there in a cage, away from home and its familiarity and comfort, was surely unrealistic in the advancement of her quality of life.
What is this quality of life anyway? Is working for some of us in an underpaid job that we hate a good quality of life, while we witness extremes in wealth and poverty around us? Is this good mental health? Where do we draw the line how do we define it, and importantly, who decides what the line is and where it is drawn?
AS can be seen acceptance of all this objectivity inevitably causes many unanswered questions to arise and certainly, we need much more before we can truly ease our consciousness. In a more truthful (and realistic) attempt by the mind to escape the confines of complete objective scientific reasoning, our current morals must be on a larger scale, deeply challenged, the financial impact on life deciding issues abolished, and our senses elevated to a new advanced level. We urgently need to create new less materialistic views for further sensory advancement in our, what could become very exiting journey onward.
Blood tests, temperature readings, new imaging techniques, electrocardiograms, and a market-driven constant new flow of other measuring equipment and gadgets are all utilised to assess the well-being (or probably more correctly, ill-being) of the creatures that confront us on a daily basis. Are we significantly altering the outcome of life and suffering or just objectively monitoring it better? Is it not through better awareness of our and our patients’ sensory wellbeing that improved quality of life can be achieved?
Are we playing god or in conflict with natural selection? Why give pathetic dying geriatric canine life a chance or even consider immortality or longevity medicine when healthy newborns are starving and young children still die of treatable infectious diseases? With dwindling food and water supplies, do we keep the old folks hanging around forever or make space for the scared and confused young? What is this life anyway? Are our ideas about reality, truth, and quality of life, with its present materialistic approach solely and insecurely governed by blind materialism, rooted in our evolutionary origins? Driven by money and sex (seeding of our DNA motive) in a world where only the rich can afford the best medical care for themselves and their pets, can we at least in part find a meaningful alternative truth in this era of post-theist confused angst and Darwinian cruelty?
Influenced by the religion and philosophic and scientific reasoning of the day, to some extent we willingly (if not anxiously) accept a ‘meaningful’ world around us. However, are we not merely blinkered from seeing the truth and mostly arrive at answers driven by fear of nonconformity or material loss, under a narrowly defined set of objective rules?
Scientific thought rules the credible world today, with the mental health of people and our pets in the hands of a few dedicated professionals as the least understood aspect of medicine. The ultimate suffering, mental suffering, has the least support and cognitive guidance. This surely should leave us (well, at least some of us) with a less than satisfactory feeling. Could this be because we are scared of dealing with something as non-objective and transcendent as feelings and emotions? Are we subconsciously aware of this sense and the urgent need for interconnectivity but find false comfort in the stratified objectivity as set by our primordial origins?
Cases of such inadequacy for most of us in such a purely objective world leave a pronounced sense of (and drive for) hedonist alternatives. To make our self-inflicted mental limitations more bearable, an increased use of drugs for pain relief, anti-depressants, anxiolytics, and finally euthanasia then are grasped at, both in pet and human medicine.
Dulling the senses seems to be the order of the day, since we’re witnessing an alarming increase in the use of illicit drugs and alcohol in the youth of developed nations. Alarmingly so, when it comes to pain relief we’re still mostly limited to basic opioids (morphine and its derivatives), non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin and its modern-day relatives), or complete aesthesia. Still more embarrassing facts (with more to come) about our objective existence in neglect of sense.
With all this existing anguish and monism in an objective money-driven world, how do we continue? Mostly we only want to help others for monetary gain or self-interest. Even more puzzling, we still daily continue to encounter and inflict more senseless emotional and physical pain and suffering. This we do by means of some of our genetically programmed survivalist actions on ourselves, each other, and the sentient beings under our governance. We pursue monitory-driven goals without any clarity of thought. We steal from one another, pollute, kill, inflict bankruptcies, create recessions, and fight wars-for oil. We step over the homeless at train stations. We eat meat. Sub-consciously we take note of the misery but continue to admire and strive to be part of the extreme wealth and body perfection keenly promoted by the media around us. We keep on struggling, hoping to obtain more wealth and happiness as our (possibly only) true salvation one day, or at least to secure a ringside seat to observe the show. Senselessly guided by rules and morals that are as empty as our objective goals we insecurely pursue poorly defined goals. Our planet, ruled by a manmade creation we call money with a meaningless existence and promising no more than what we can objectively gain until our objective lives end—sometimes abruptly. We then rather vainly hope that God is there waiting for us, pointing directions to the Pearly Gates.
Does this fear-driven ignorance stem from our recently discovered Darwinian-based animal origins and the Discovery Channel creating global awareness of this, where Richard Dawkins and others failed, or is this simplistic survivalist concept forming the basis for most theories in the biological sciences because it is all that is familiar to us so far? With the genome and natural selection as our objective bio-guides, we shape our lives as directed by their regal pointers. We then use financially driven politics and science, and (if desperate) philosophical reasoning, all with their rather shaky foundations as pillars to lean on. Is it all we have?
Religion, as a supply of meaning and hope to at least some, has become a much more distant option. Religion, surviving for centuries as a universal recycling bin for our sins also, for well over 2,000 years, accounted for the unexplained. Its exposure to cruelty, nepotism, and self-interested ability to segregate, however, have made it reach its sell-by date.
Now left with objective values such as physical good health, beauty, and financial success, the only ‘true’ yardsticks of wellbeing, we face the harsh reality of objectively all failing one day—perhaps why so much attention drawn to longevity medicine. Under such influence, it would be nice to again wish for a god and a heaven to give support and alternatives for the meek amongst us.
In our new objective world where there is no god (and if there was, how much for a business class ticket to see him?), should we not euthanize every mental or physical suffering being, guided by a strict set of academic, board-controlled guidelines? Should we not help relieve anguish and suffering and, in doing so, help this new god (besides our money god) we call Natural Selection along a bit?
While I was writing this, a much respected natural science writer, Richard Dawkins, published The God Delusion. In this book, although accurately in support of biological scientific beliefs today (and probably as usual for book of this type, critically reviewed by religious groups and churches), I personally failed to discover more public value than known Darwinian facts. It had in principle (to me at least) not much more to offer the public in general than the Naked Ape by Desmond Morris and other similar books years ago emphasising the more objective proof of our undeniable animal origins and natural selection.
Furthermore, we should be careful that such a purely objective view may not create a survivalist and antagonistic approach to life amongst the less informed and more gullible. The sensation-stirring name of the book was at least welcome proof that such issues still intrigue some of us more than books on how to turn ‘bulls into bears’ under current market conditions, or ‘my life as a fifth runner-up on Tranzanian Idol.
With objectively correct books such as these offering no alternatives beyond the historical Darwinian and Mendelian genetic concepts of life, and with an ignorantly self-absorbed DNA as the principle driving force aiming to spread its pompous self as best it can— in anticipation that a Brad Pitt lookalike with Einstein's brain and the survival skills of the A team will pop up—what else can we hope for? As an aid in adding more fuel to the fire of segregation created by wealth and politico-cultural diversity, it certainly serves its purpose—failing to answer what we’re searching for while simultaneously raising more concern for our destiny as a whole.
Based purely on this ‘blind’ view of genomic selection as driven by a lusty DNA, it may then also be quite sensible to stimulate segregation in order to create a more diverse gene pool (as mentioned before)—welcome back apartheid. One would also hate to think of the impact on the less ethically-minded amongst us (especially in responsible positions) in discovering a world purely designed for natural selection and survival of the fittest (or on the desperately depressed)—so long ethics. We must be very careful that what we propose doesn’t clash with our more puritan beliefs concerning peace and harmony for all beings.
Any ‘rational’ mind would, I hope, hasten to any idea in support of an alternative option. Interconnectivity, creating harmony and togetherness in sense may just be one. To any self-doubters (or doubters of the self) now reaching out for religion, be aware of the stratification and cruelty that religion has and still is causing, but also acknowledge all it has given humankind.
We only have to sit and stare in awe at the magnificence of the Sistine Chapel or any old cathedral in Paris, Prague, Vienna, Stockholm, Turkey, or wherever else religion inspired people to do. Or alternatively enter the calm of any mosque or temple The emotion filled melodies, symphonies, and songs from eras past created by Mozart (Requiem), Beethoven (Symphony #9) and Bach (Mass in B-Minor) for the glory of god exemplify the deific sense in being, expressed as sound. The art of the Renaissance and even later the impressionists, such as Pissarro, van Gogh, and Monet creates feeling through vision, all of this reflecting the essence of our higher being in sense. To marvel at the wonders inspired by such creations of humans and religion’s influence on them is to marvel at one of our more noble qualities as human beings—our ability to create through feeling in sense. Philosophising about aesthetics and beauty and its origins aside here, a mere walk through any major art museum in Europe or elsewhere would suffice to prove the gratifying part ‘sense’ (as inspired by religion) has played throughout our evolutionary progress.
To break all this down to the selfish seeding of an objective ‘senseless’ DNA is insulting. Equally senseless is the historical objective cruelty as enforced by the numerous reigning churches of the past—or of today. We must tap into our objective gains selflessly, merely as a guide to sensory advancement, and not simply replace one demon with another and fall victim to pure scientific or technocratic objectivism and its cruelty as our new god. We need to liberate this ageless struggling sense more urgently and even more passionately.
Natural science in general today (even if viewed more ‘open-mindedly), continues to give us only three broadly objective choices about the creation of life. The choices presented are grand design (its name attempting to hide its insecurity), the evolutionary off-chance (fluke) mutation (this insults before it evokes true interest) and genomic natural selection.
Anyone with a basic background in objective science will get no prizes for guessing that the Natural Selection theory is the most plausible current explanation. So how does this enlighten us besides objective gains? Most middle-aged scientists and bio-medically trained professionals around the world today ‘grew up’ with the DNA and messenger RNA concept, a basic tool in new era medicine.
Many of them are firm believers and members of various religious groups. Just as a matter of interest, at the time of writing this, the benefits derived from genetic and stem cell research are already evident in the first gene therapy and stem cell clinics for dogs—functioning commercially, of course.
If any of this sounds scary, it should be, because none of this is far- fetched anymore in today’s new world of biotechnology. It goes much further toward the immortalists’ nanotechnology, where (rumour has it) we should invest. Nanotechnology could in the future replace rundown body parts and keep us going and going and going—a bit like the battery bunny on the TV.
The term nanotechnology is derived from its dealings with matter smaller than 100 nanometres and hence its extension into molecular and cellular self-assembly. What has been termed Nano robotics in the future could mean simply endoscopically inserting or injecting a new ‘pancreas repairer’. These Nano-robots would then go on search-and-repair missions inside the body, adding new meaning to the term ‘the doctor is in’. The problem will then become one of who can afford this treatment and who cannot.
Continuing objectively to convince ourselves of the objective benefit of euthanasia (which I am going to perform on Marley), it may also be seen as a more meaningful route (easier than under theism) to pursue at times of suffering for the genetically unfit or poor—not only for pets but for humans as well. At least this may seem feasible from our present restrictive Darwinian outlook. We may continue to make objective sense in a growing atheistic society, where confusion reigns and suffering, both emotional and physical, is commonplace in extending it further.
Let’s face it, the emotional burden of failure (where success is principally based on financial achievement, sexual attraction, and perfect mental and physical health as the only worthy goals) is a hard one to carry. The terminal losers then become an attractive target—and the next lucrative market for the manufactures of our Termination Machine to enter. We could now even continue with eugenics as far as considering anybody who doesn’t make a certain contribution to society and/or meet certain criteria unfit in the scheme of things. After all, the world’s resources are dwindling.
Even worse, should poor people have the right to live, since they’ve already been deprived of many things only money can buy, including adequate healthcare, nutrition and proper education? Why not? Based on objective Darwinism and our definition of suffering, should they continue in such a state of unwellness and be a burden on our dwindling planetary supplies? Might it not become objectively correct to apply euthanasia to such individuals and then take comfort in the fact that natural selection is doing its thing more humanely?
Now confronted by classifying ‘normal’ mental health and faced with such a futile objective outlook on life, abandoned by religion and flooded by sorrow and mental anguish, what do we do? We will have reached a mental blind alley and need an urgent escape route from this moral apathy. Some will grasp at the ‘comfort’ that psychotherapy and drugs may offer (much more about this later) and others will make poor lifestyle choices. Both natural selection (science) and religion (for some of us) are dismally failing to sooth our sensory wellbeing. Is science going to rescue us in another way?
The goal of natural selection is blind DNA propagation with no more purpose than spreading as many copies of itself as possible, in anticipation of diversity governed by survivalist ‘instincts’. The uneducated poor and those annoying influenza viruses are all pretty good at this and have more offspring than your average well-educated young professionals, many of whom consider the responsibility of having offspring in today’s world too much of a burden. I can think at least of a handful of gifted and good-looking fit young colleagues of mine in this category, some scared by the ‘financial responsibility’ of having children or deterred by financial aspirations, even on double incomes! For this group Existence then becomes nothing more than a senseless self-appeasing business, a genomic waste, over in a flash based on the timelessness of space. Unless we consider option (b).
A blind natural selection theory furthermore creates many opportunities for ’cheats’ in a world of monetary monism, so we could simply cheat or buy our way out of all of this mayhem; or legally debate checks and balances for the system to work for us. If we have enough money, besides a good lawyer, we may just be able to buy the patent rights to the whole concept of natural selection (though I probably shouldn’t have said that, amazing what a good lawyer and lots of money can do). Soon the rich will be able to buy stem cells (criminals will be stealing them), clone themselves, and get better genes for their progeny (in case she has Uncle Maurice’s ugly nose or Aunt Agnes’s fat bottom). So much for diversity and sense! Drug lords and pimps will have ample opportunity for gene expression while gifted young children born into poor families will have no chance.
If science had preceded history, we could have had a few Hitlers. I’m sure Hitler and his Gestapo doctors would have kept a few clones handy, given the way the war went towards the end (or if not for that, at least to have a clone handy for a bad moustache day or a war tribunal decision). These are scary thoughts indeed.
As antiquated, cruel systems used to manipulate and control the masses by a few (creating stratification), religion, money and politics should be seen as morally wrong. With such powerful systems now under the influence and control of booming capitalism, we are mentally even worse off, which are worrying and depressing concepts. Global warming and dwindling natural resources have become issues for politicians, business people, and their financially-driven decision makers. Companies making enormous amounts of money from unnecessary food supplements, homeopathic drugs, cosmetics, and unneeded chemical agents (to give but a few of many examples) abound and pollute more than they contribute to the wellbeing of humans. This is factual, unless you belong to the fraternity that finds comfort in the belief that the shark cartilage suppository you inserted this morning or the deer velvet capsule you swallowed has significantly contributed to your healthcare.
It sadly seems that under such a past (and still present) Darwinian regime of "natural" reproductive selection with a survival of the fittest concept, odious experiences—as well as endemic low-grade malaise—are and will remain commonplace (and will get worse).
It seems easy and it’s considered natural to see a world (through fearful eyes) filled with mistrusting individuals and creatures, all selfishly and antagonistically fighting for a miserable form of survival, in the end, only to die a cruel and often painfully (emotionally or physically) drawn-out death filled with unanswered questions and uncertainty. We can create and even justify cultural and socioeconomic barriers and at times use them to our own advantage in our need to ‘belong’ and to reduce our own juvenile fears. Alarmingly, politicians thrive on promoting segregation through patriotism and national pride. Likewise, in the same country, different parties thrive on spreading fear and separatist ideas.
“Euthanasia seems to be formidable and easily acceptable part of this world.
Continuing this bleak outlook, we see desperately unhappy people in a world of extreme excesses and depravation. We globally see societies in need of proper nutrition and healthcare and, on the other hand, extreme wealth in a few individuals creating stratified communities (fear-filled on both sides). Under our new god of natural selection, driven by its money disciples, we coldly accept that there will always be winners and losers.
We can justify oil wars and religiously-driven terrorist attacks under option (a). Clearly, we have unbalanced the scales and live empty, threatened lives (even when blessed with excess). With vague and uncertain goals and expectations, in a Cartesian world where both god and Darwin have failed to give us a well-defined purpose to life, we blindly believe (and are reassured) that capitalism is the democratic fair way, at times not at all aware of what other options we may have.
In my youth, naivety led me to believe that a privileged financial and educational stance in life was natural selection at play, selecting the fit and survivalist driven—and tough luck for the poor uneducated buggers out there. Witnessing later in life (while working with poor communities in developing countries) the desperation in good people (genetically fit and wise but only poor in financial terms and deprived of education due to lack of opportunity), I could merely hope for better alternatives to measure human worth and success by using yet undiscovered wisdom.
I was convinced that life had more meaning than under our present restrictive Darwinian views. I must admit that I also spent a fair bit of time wondering why some of those apparent ‘poor losers’ oddly seemed so happy compared to their suit-clad counterparts on Wall Street. What drove them? Was it ignorance, the next episode of Dr Phil or Idol on TV, not dying of starvation, the good fortune of not having been eaten by a crocodile for another day, or (more plausibly) opening time at the pub? Or was there something even more profound?
Driven by a firm belief in goodness, I was starting to see that there is true joy and love, detached from all this objective materialism. The world isn’t just a clear-cut division between rude winners and subservient losers, rich and poor. Acceptance of the interdependency in sense under option(b) is a first guide to life as a whole. This will continue to become more clear as we continue.
Options better than egotistic materialism and reproductive success or ‘blind’ religion must and do exist. In addition, are there any clues around us? I became convinced that an ultimate higher state of sensory evolution would lead to a much less painful and more meaningful existence for all creatures in the future. It was evident in and around us and I wanted to find more support and meaning to this. There is a rhythm and sense around us acting as a guide in embarking on the re-enchephalization of homo sapiens. The other option is to confront the Termination Machine.
Besides Marley, my day will soon be busy with a constant flow of skin diseases, broken legs, coughing dogs, vomiting cats, and a few routine surgeries, catering for the weak and unfit.
It’s invigorating to see the love expressed for an at times ‘ugly’ little fur ball and the joy such a little creature can offer its owner—not only interdependency on cells and organs and their physiological functions but also interdependency on each other and other sentient beings for our overall emotional wellbeing and care. Such demands (albeit at times misguided) are essentially a subconscious sense of ‘sensing’ that selflessly caring for life and its interconnectivity is urgent and essential. Cells dependent on each other to form organs in support of an organism, organisms in turn dependent on each other forming groups, equally interdependent and together moving forward- driven and dependent on each other reaching out in sense and feeling, our ultimate achievement so far.
DNA is not just interested in multiplication. It’s primarily concerned with increasing the odds of creating a sensible organism in this universe of abundance. The conclusion is simple—it is not possible for the Termination Machine to be observant to this ‘sense’. It is, however, impossible for us humans to be unobservant to this sense in being.
What we are all daily witnessing is not some selfish survivalist strategy longing for ennui, but a clear pattern of loving interconnectivity longing for sensory appeasement (option b).
If only we could all see this urgent need to coexist in harmony, life about us, not me the individual or we the group. All we need is this basic age- old wisdom to discover that love may be much more than an imprinted reproductive strategy or an ‘underused’ cliché, but a vital scientific key to setting the stage for the amazing and euphoric advancement of our sensory evolution. We should not be victims to pure objective science, politics, or religion unless we want evolutionary regression and further delay in sensory progression and wellbeing for all. We haven’t even vaguely reached our evolutionary goals of advanced sensory wellbeing and perception. The principle of interconnectivity forms only one of the pillars of our future. Purpose driven to enhance sense and mental development in a universal context is the other.
Chapter Two
SENSING THROUGH OBJECTS
‘Our eyes see too much of the world and too little of the heart and soul’.
Confucius
‘The wise man is informed in what is right and the inferior man in what will pay’.
Confucius
Now armed with a clear purpose to maintain the health of our purpose driven sensory evolution on a global and universal scale we can push the confusion of chapter I aside. We can also find comfort in the interconnectivity of everything.
Under guidance now to preserve the wellbeing of sense in all its forms, we can set clearly defined ethics and morals. We can now consider anything that may harm the wellbeing of sense or inflict suffering or pain on any sentient being as unethical and morally wrong. We .can also already see how objective fixations and materialism is morally wrong
Perhaps philosophy has always (as a reflection of higher reasoning) directed and predetermined subconscious thoughts in religion, science, and mathematics. Perhaps it works in reverse. It is, however, still a constant yardstick of our sensory awareness and possibilities. Reflecting on some aspects of philosophical reasoning, albeit at times fleetingly and amateurishly so, is essential when faced with the aforementioned moral dilemmas. Great philosophers have existed through the ages, their ideas reflecting mostly in our subconscious mind but possibly shaping our lives much more than most of us think.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was an eminent German philosopher who we cannot disregard in our quest because of his prominent impact on morality and his involvement with metaphysics (dealing with the principles of reality). Kant was born in the east Prussian city of Königsberg. He spent his entire life there, attended the local university, and amazingly never travelled more than fifty miles from his home. Immanuel Kant became one of the most influential thinkers in the history of western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed.
Kant is important to us because of his theme argument, revolving around the impossibility of extending knowledge to the upper sensible realm of ‘speculative’ metaphysics and that knowledge is constrained by the mathematical and scientific empirical world. This approach was possibly the niche for his intellectual credibility in a Cartesian world, but its main value lies in drawing attention to the objective confinement of sensory expansion. With such set boundaries in great thinkers like Kant and others to follow, they all transgress in merely trying to prove ‘fact’ by objectively comparing things to known facts.
In the sciences, we get lost in such objective relativities in order to be respected and academic in our approach. In mathematics, we either get governed or confined by rules mostly subject to objectivity (as set by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica) to avoid getting ridiculously over-involved with objective conflicts. Alternatively, we search for something more profound, as did Douglas R. Hofstadter in his brilliant book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by sensing and mathematically theorizing a loop-like pattern in the world around us.
Accordingly, today in conventional medicine we only acknowledge evidence-based (showing objective results) research, a welcome relief to most patients!
Kantian reasoning and its roots in a priori objective observation also to some extent influenced our intellect in the acceptance of the concept of evolution. In principle, Darwinism is based on objective comparisons in the biological world. Keep in mind, however, that the initial idea of evolution was abstract and non-objective, no more than an assumption. Finding an ape-human like skull in the backyard for the first time does not trigger the concept of evolution, thoughts and sense grasped what was already there.
Darwin sailed around the world in the Beagle and recorded, compared, and noted objective data. It was however abstract thoughts and sense by him and others breaking away from conformity that initially triggered the idea of evolution. He collected objective data merely as a means to support a preconceived idea (a theorem rule was set-see below). It triggered an ongoing and endless search for objective proof from skull digging to eventually support in genetics as we have today. It is impossible to think of even the most complex computer-robot, programmed to collect and analyse the most refined naturalistic data to come up with the concept of evolution setting the basis for all future offspring concepts—unless we design a program with the idea of evolution in its database.
Some may still think that even evolution, with all its objective testimony, is a theory in need of more substance. Surely it is not, what more evidence do we want? Evolution sceptics can outright be discarded as scientifically wrong, if for no reason other than to maintain the foundations of biomedical knowledge today. Simultaneously, however, in their ignorance, possibly not more off-beat than some modern day frantically objective evolutionary biologists. Once caught in complexities (and, at times, absurdities) of such ‘open’ arguments, more senseless complexities always do arise.
I give the following example, used in theoretical math and the design of artificial intelligence. I’m merely drawing on all resources possible to reinforce sense in this enigma we call life.]
The following sentence is false.
The preceding sentence is true.
Our computer mind is stumped here!
Now add a time aspect to the above:
The following sentence was false (oxymoron).
The preceding sentence would be true.
Yes, I’m also scratching my head and reading it again, concluding that who in their right mind would write stuff like this, unless an error occurred in omitting sentences in between? The reason we see this as bizarre is because we have sense. Besides behaving like a pre-programmed computer (where the above is quite significant), we would hopefully ‘sense’ there is a sentence missing in between. If not entrapped in the objectivity of words, we would start thinking: What are the missing sentences? With sense, utilised in a benign environment detached from material gain, we have a better chance of filling the gaps truthfully between sentences.
Imagine all the possible different fill-gap sentences a million individuals would come up with, depending on who, what, where, what culture, and era they were born. All the missing fill-gap sentences will have different meaning to different individuals, but all will make some sort of sense in general to someone somewhere.
We all make up our own little stories based on destiny and feeling. Having sense, we stand out from the computer struggling with this concept, by firstly sensing the problem and then creating infinite possibilities of what could make it appear sensible. We even have the sense to think in terms of why on earth are we thinking any of this? The computer, on the other hand, needs rules to fill these gaps—a program, as an example, telling it to only use sentences of no more than five words starting with T and ending with A will be a start. However, it will still come up mainly with some meaningless, unstructured sentences and gibberish.
The point made for our purposes here is: Starting with narrowly defined objective values and acting under the further confines of these objectively determined confused rules, we behave like computers. Omnipotent, primeval and ubiquitous Sense, on the other hand, opens up our universe of infinity.
We can clearly see how easy it is to get entangled in endless confusion and complexities and end up with all sorts of gibberish when too fixated with objectivity and its narrowly defined rules.
Invaluable for our purposes here is the computer-assisted benefits (amongst many others) of objectively mapping the human and dog chromosome and genome. This objective now having been achieved, it shows only minor differences in genomic makeup between the two species. In this, not-too-unexpected discovery, lies not only some support for the natural selection theory, but enormous potential medical benefits for both our companion animals and us. Surely, it can only be rejected by the foolhardy.
However, with so many fill-gap sentences that may be employed to make ‘sense’ of our objective world, these enlightening sensory awakenings (such as Darwinism, gene mapping or quantum theory) act as important objective guides, in turn now subject to our newly set theorem rules—as we continue our search for sense. They serve, possibly, as only one of many rules (sentences) we may have employed as pointers to prove a theorem in our search for proof of our objective existence and to fill the gaps between sentences. This in turn depends on who writes the sentences and sets the core rules, if any (more on this later). Based on this let’s not set the theorem rules too narrowly or confine our sense too pliantly without constantly being aware of our more august purpose, advancing sense.
More intriguingly, are such objective assessments not just recordings of what simply ‘is and will be’, as sense emerges? We should respect them and use them as our anchors before we enter the void of the ‘empty’. However, the majority of us spend well over ninety percent 90% (an assumption only) of our lives fixated by this point one percent 0.1% (not an assumption) of the objective world, ignoring or forgetting the 99.9% space that exist between objects and their molecules. What if currently only a small part, let us assume, another 0.1% of the 99.9% emptiness, equates to our present ‘sense’ so far of the objective universe, thus our slow and at times confused sensory progress to obtain an ultimate equilibrium? So the reason we cannot objectify our sense (or thinking about thinking) is because of its non-objective existence in a space of unimaginable dimensions. What an unimaginable amount of sense awaits us.
My proposal or theorem as an example of our approach to our origins and demise:
The universe consists of Nothing (Space and our non-objective thinking or sense), as now self-appointed mathematicians, we shall call this N; and Everything (everything else in the objective universe), which we’ll call E.
We can now develop a string theory from this. A string theory is a set of values starting out with one or two values under guidance of theorem rules to form an axiom (an alternative to a traditional rule). The objective is to set out in an attempt to prove the completeness and consistency of an axiom under theorem rules. If such an axiom (under these theorem rules) is processed and obeys such rules, it results in a complete and consistent axiom—a new proven theory!
Our proposed string theory N is very simple. It has only one rule (two values N and E), discursively concluded: Based on our objective interpretation of the universe, E must always have N to exist. Ours is simple because we have no idea whether other rules may exist and what they are except for our awareness of (the objective) birth followed by death of stars. We further equate the vacuous effect seen in outer space to the nothing that resulted in the objective everything. Our recent sensory advancement and awareness of energy existing in and between objects that cannot be destroyed, only converted from one form to another (more on this later), makes it quite plausible that the big nothing is in everything. However, we continue with our objective string theories since it is rather difficult to speculate about the invisible.
We tend to see the objective as everything we can explain or prove and understand as the creator of sense. Pursuing our favourite pastime, to make axioms fit objective rules, we constantly and feverishly search for new objective rules to dogmatically apply in our understanding of the universe. Should we not ask ourselves, did sense perhaps not originate from the objective world but the other way around? Should we not for the last two thousand years have allowed unequivocal sense a more honoured place in our explorations to allow other possibilities (other axioms under different theorem rules) without so much attachment to a few objective values? Sense is
We can see the enormity of the task ahead, being confined to a minuscule part of an objective string (our emerging sense in context of our evolutionary presence on Earth) and not knowing if any arduously discovered theorem rules will remain true as we continue on our path! However, it makes us feel secure and gives us ‘confidence’.
I shall leave these philosophical thoughts with one last thought: If we consider our mind (object) as sense-creator, is the ultimate being(s) not the ones with supremely advanced sense and less objective being? Is this perhaps our purpose here and what our sensible gene is in search of, and will this possibly result in the complete ‘void’ or ultimate sense again?
Zen Buddhism, in its practice of detachment and even detachment from detachment, is possibly unknowingly in search of more contact with this ‘Void’ where sense is omnipresent. If anything, this may result in offspring discoveries, but more important is the concept of the ultimate ‘big emptiness’ where our non-objective sense has its roots’. Our extreme involvement with the objective world has made us fail to see the importance of this inevitable ‘void’ (until death). We should therefore involve ourselves much more with this ‘void in sense’. This ‘emptiness’ where sense harbours and we ignore because we cannot place it in a bottle and sell (unless to the completely ignorant promoted by ‘clever’ marketeers). Sense identify with part of the ‘void’ between objects and in objects and we see this in the non-objective wisdom experienced around us- seeds growing, embryos developing, foals stumbling to get up and make headway for the teat, wounds healing. Intelligence and sense evolving to higher levels.
We are all enveloped in this sense, and en route to out of the vast ‘nothing’ create unimaginable new sense. Perhaps the ultimate drive of DNA is to create sense out of the void, with our encounters and understanding of the objective world serving as mere steppingstones in a river, a river peacefully and purposely flowing towards a vast ocean of knowledge. Once there was nothing (supreme sense) –now we have emerging sense making us aware of the objective and our being in sense—not the other way round. Again drawing the Confucian heaven and earth closer under option (b) as our purpose here.
If we are truly in control of our lives, we are free from preconceptions, obduracy and egoism because there is no sense in this; only objective fixatons.
Acceptance, in the above light of our limitations in a narrowly defined objective world (and more, as will be revealed), allows us to be more open-minded and in a less hierarchical manner rediscover the similarity and interconnectivity between all life forms involved with sensory expansion—nothing. Keep in mind that the initial concepts of all the objective understandings of our world—evolutionary theory, gravity, planetary movement, nuclear energy, mass (Eureka!)—all originated from assumptions (nothing but sense), imbedded but employing a minuscule part of our sense (while doing nothing). We then realise this non-objective interconnectivity of everything. The objectivity of it all although important, has kept us enormously busy, and at times distracted from our progression in sense.
The concept of evolution had rid us of ignoring our animal origins, positively stimulating our sense of all the interconnectivity around us, and no doubt helped pave the way to new advances in biological and medical reasoning. Possibly also stimulating better care for other sentient beings on our planet. However, such liberation of thought and initial freeing of sense has again ensnared us in an ongoing process of restrictive sensory evolution with an unnecessary antagonistic view of the universe, made so through cruel competitive Darwinian behaviour. We find ourselves once more entrapped in the objective confines in a period on par with Copernicus trying to convince the world that the earth was not the centre of the universe. The only fixed truth, an ongoing drive to sensory enhancement (expansion of Sense into the void) as a clear pattern we seem to miss. The mass mental energy and advanced understanding of our universe is our ultimate achievement here on Earth, much more so than the cities, buildings and planes we have built.
In his Critique of Pure Reason (first edition 1781) Kant, typical of the Cartesian world in which these statements were made, opens the preface as follows:
‘Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. However, it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labours must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion.’
I cannot help but think of this Kantian limitation of not being able to extend sense beyond experience as a similar restriction as our computer confronted by sentences. In essence, Kant voiced the opinion and analytically concluded, typical of our need for ‘visible objective’ truths, that ‘truth’ consists in accordance of cognition with an object (as identified through experience); this object must, by this very same recognition of the object, be distinguished from all other objects based on experience (programming).
Kantian confinement of sense continues:
‘Everything, every representation even, in so far as we conscious of it, may be entitled object. But it is a question for deeper enquiry what the word 'object' ought to signify in respect of appearances when these are viewed not in so far as they are (as representations) objects, but only in so far as they stand for an object.’
We cannot experience beyond the object according to Kant, similar to our programmed (experienced) computer with the latest software, facing two conflicting sentences.
This reasoning exists in most of science and evidence-based medical research. Scientific objectivity is an unimaginable ‘fact’ of life. As the saying goes, ‘get real’. In reply, we can now confidently also offer, thank goodness sense happens!
Outside Kant’s sphere (based on experiencing objects), nothing exists (quite right?), emphasising our extreme involvement in objectivity in almost all aspects of life. As the song goes, ‘We live in a material word and I am a material girl’. Kant could have paid royalties to use this as a jingle to promote his Critique of Pure Reason.
Today, 17,300,210 people were on Skype as I wrote this, living in a city with 4.7 million people while looking up a word in an on-line dictionary as the 3,233,003rd searcher. Fact and figures, making interesting objective sense and placing us firmly where we are, with our feet solidly anchored on Earth with heaven stretching further and further.
Political races, athletics, wars, and grossly overpaid CEOs all have in common that they find themselves in a society that measures and compares existing objective values, and consequently is driven by fear of loss of such objective value –feet cemented into the ground. Objectivity and its fixed values create measurable security, or so it seems. Whether relativist or absolutist in our approach, we constantly compare ourselves to others or one object to another. Observing the lifestyles of the rich and famous and instant wealth seen in lottery winners, with TV ads constantly promoting some objective value or image to strive for, we create low self-worth in the majority of people. We then keep hoping that we will objectively be better off one day.
All of philosophy, although it seems to be profoundly occupied with ethics in its search for truth at times, must be careful not to end up with no more than objective values and terminology as well.
The anchor that Confucius relates to beckons us to be rationally involved with such objective surroundings, a small task. We should not forget, however, the principle task, which is drawing heaven closer. Our feet solidly planted on Earth in objectivity, we are intellectually constrained unless we pay heed to this task.
So why this battle against blind objectivism, besides my emotional struggle in creating realist ethical and moral values? As seen so far, objective fixation can create narrowly defined ‘unobtainable’ or even false goals and no more than low self-worth in the majority. In turn, this leads to mental ailments, depression, and other psychopathic tendencies. Furthermore, if its foundations are wrong, it can set us en route into complete darkness. Besides, to the winners the view from the top can appear rather disappointing and lonely, to the losers the effort in trying hardly worth it.
In summary on Kant’s part here, cognition (as it is stated by Kant) is therefore false if it does not agree with the object to which it relates to through experience and is thus a purely deductive process of what we can see and measure. Simply put, either you are smarter, richer, or prettier than the next person or you are not. Life is simple, is it not? Find a place in the pecking order of survival and struggle or cheat your way to a better position? With such a solid reference base and its blatant acceptance of sensory constraints, a Kantian world gained much credibility, even recent revival amongst scientists. It is worrying that mostly, together with a Cartesian view of our world, these values still set the accepted norm for modern day reasoning in medical science. Splitting the mind and the body may sound like an extinct Cartesian view, but it is still the essence of our present world; even more disturbing, a world where objectivity (money) rules and the body object is treated with much more devotion than sense itself.
We may now continue to that, in a Kantian sense, if an animal suffers no ‘measurable’ pain it is none of our business, as long as it does not affect its measurable productivity. As an example, we do dehorning of cattle without anaesthesia for cost benefit because it interferes with production of meat (carcass quality when they head butt each other, cramped into a truck). After all, who amongst us meat eaters wants to see objectionable bruises when seeking fresh cherry-coloured, blood-tinged flesh? We deliberately overlook the pain aspect of this procedure because it is not much of a measurable (objective) concern and would furthermore (relatively) interfere with the production cost. Or is it, if we consider the mental health of sensitive individuals and sentient beings being eaten as a potential issue for future healthcare?
So Kant, like Dawkins further, nobly so, help us in defining the harsh reality of a credible Darwinian world where euthanasia is an option. Euthanasia, in a Kantian sense, is also a deductive process based on familiar objects. A complex cascade, governed by objective values, is at play when making the decision to perform euthanasia. The clinician and pet owner agree (subjectively) to experience the patient’s condition as painful, with a poor quality of life and limited treatment prospects. This decision is substantiated by the interpretation of objective values such as X-rays, ultrasounds, laboratory reports, pathology reports, age, and cost of care. Such interpretations are generally purely objective and subject to statistics (more about this below) before they gain professional acceptance. In terms of our string theorem, in this case, the theorem rules are set and the owner and clinician are trying to make the patient (axiom) fit the rules—not an entirely comfortable place for the patient under discussion, as an axiom governed by its theorem rules.
Our concerns are further justified once we realise the shortcomings of objective data as shown by recent publications in peer-reviewed, evidence-based publications. I use imagery as an example because of its vital role today in diagnostics, often deciding whether a patient is in need of surgery or not. Significant disparity exists between different imaging specialists’ interpretation of grades of hip dysplasia. Ultrasound sensitivity on recordings of lesions related to pancreas (60% sensitivity), liver, and adrenals are furthermore open to different levels of sensitivity in the hands of different specialists. Furthermore, many of these measuring devices and monitoring tools are ‘unaware’ of the unknown features of the object under study, simply ignoring them due to lack of knowledge or objective means of measurement. We should also not forget the limitations of the instruments chosen to record such objective values, even with high claims of accuracy. The machine still needs a mind with sense to operate it.
This important issue becomes even more complicated if we hear what the historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn has to add to this topic, considering all we know in the professions originate from a higher educational facility. Kuhn’s philosophical demure revolves around seeing scientific research, even evidence-based, as a shift in social order.
Simply put, his statement implies that we are quite likely to get objective proof of a medicine, let us say Cure Piles working at some level if professor Shares has financial gain as a result of proving so. Add a postgraduate student Ms Must get an A assist to in the study, and we’re all set to prove there is a cure for piles in ‘Cure Piles’. Please note this is no intention to point any fingers at our higher education facilities, for which I have enormous respect as one of their minor seedlings. It merely serves as an example to serve our quest into sense. If we spend much time trying to prove something we believe is true, we should eventually find some objective proof to do so. Remember how many sentences we can fill the gap with, all making some sort of sense to someone, somewhere?
Areas where the debate becomes much more important (and heated) are the statistics employed in medicine and the marketing strategies of the pharmaceutical industry. Exploiting such statistics to support the use of certain drugs, not to mention the natural remedies market, which we will get to later.
Statistics (an esoteric and insulting term if you happen to be the patient), however, still serve as an important guide to patient care, their treatment options, and outcome. In evidence-based medical research it serves as a pivot to support efficacy of new medicines or treatment options. Based entirely on objective values, it is sadly open to much error. As an example, after completion of all the tests and on confirmation of Marley’s pancreatic carcinoma, we were faced with the options to treat (with the latest statistically beneficial chemotherapy) or not to treat. If we treat, what can we expect?
Statistically (how I dislike this word), dogs with Marley’s type of cancer will survive an average of four months without any treatment. The types of cancer and their grading by different pathologists is beyond the scope of this book but, suffice it to say, it does create more scope for objective differences to enter our equation. Based on this, it’s not uncommon amongst pathologists (whom I professionally hold in high regard) to get second and third opinions from their colleagues in cases of uncertainty or where grading can be life deciding. In Marley’s case, employing surgery, followed by combination latest chemotherapy, survival (Darwinian influence in society, even television now, use this term to attract people) can be an average of thirteen months (statistically), compared to the statistical four months without treatment.
Statistics such as used above were arrived at by taking a study group (rather humiliating, if you’re terminally ill, to be a statistic in a study group) of ninety-seven dogs treated with the new drug combination and comparing it to a group not treated, called a control group (sounds like much more fun being in this group).
Treatment may not be too bad an option to consider, presented as above—so far.
However, this statistic becomes enormously hard to swallow if we consider the following. In the untreated group, certainly the owners’ approaches were more objective, maybe due to financial constraints or a quality of life (QOL) directed approach. This group, at the start already by very means of its nature a less dedicated group, may have called for euthanasia only one week after accepting their dog had terminal cancer. In this group, also more likely to be financially constrained, there may have been individuals pressurised by busy schedules at work, travel obligations, or simply have decided to dump added anxiety from their already anxious lives by means of early euthanasia. A small few may have stayed home and lovingly nursed their companions along with dedication and care for another twenty months, dragging the statistic up somewhat. This issue confronts us more poignantly if we think in terms of a human patient under a spouse’s or family care with a will to live compare to the lonely bachelor.
In the study group, on the other hand, concerned owners, under the guidance of highly skilled professionals, were driven to keep patients alive as long as possible. If you are researcher trying to establish the efficacy of a new treatment, the statistic becomes the patient. Under such finely monitored conditions, with supervised treatment and good nursing, the statistics will improve significantly, even without the drugs.
We may now consider incorporating a third study group with the exact same conditions but no chemotherapy; if we should do so what outcome do we expect? Other factors we should consider are that even the same cancer behaves differently in different patients in different environments. Furthermore, keep in mind that the counting starts when the patient is presented for the first time to the doctor and a medical record is opened. It is also here where the QOL factor (more on this later) enters again, with all the complexities it raises. How do we measure it? How do different individuals with different values and sensitivity levels interpret it?
The ‘objective-minded’ clinician, trying to publish a new paper on his or her new treatment and its benefits, would be inclined to read QOL differently than the veterinary nurse caring for Marley daily in ICU, sensing the QOL from a different angle. I can immediately bring to mind numerous drugs with minor benefit at enormous cost that have been launch under the above guidelines. Shame on the pharmaceutical industry.
Therefore, to refer at times like these in an erudite manner to statistics only serves to direct some of the stress and decision-making away from the practitioner (and even the owner), but once analysed is severely unsatisfactory. It also fails dismally to supply the comfort searched for by the majority of loving family members and pet owners who typically first respond by questioning the distress factor caused by the chemotherapy.
Ironically, I am not aware of many practitioners who can offer more than statistics in return— 30% of patients may vomit, 50% will have diarrhoea, another 15% will get severely anaemic and so on, 5% (kindly put) dropped out of the study.
Continuing to displease, in many cases the study groups used to exemplify such statistics can be frightfully small; as few as ten or fewer patients undergoing a treatment may suffice to compare and justify the initiation of a new protocol. The level of pain or distress caused by the therapy administered to the patient does not reflect realistically in such statistics because, as mentioned, up until now no accurate objective measurements for these exist. Besides, the patient is already in such agony, how do you go about grading the added distress?
We certainly employ pain relief randomly in all these patients, giving them the ‘benefit of the doubt’. (How a patient must love this phrase if ‘benefit’ from doubt is all that is left!) To prove another point, a current commonly used pain relief, in conjunction with chemotherapy in veterinary practice, is the human prescription drug, tramadol. (PLEASE NOTE: both a prescription and strict veterinary guidance are needed to use this on your pet or yourself.)
In people, tramadol may have some of its beneficial effects more due to its anti-depressant effect. Studies have shown that depressed people have a lower pain threshold. The lonely old widower dying of cancer, compared to the young mother also dying of the same cancer with a child entering the first year of school, serves as a sorrowful example. The latter is prepared to mask some physical pain in order to survive longer simply to witness the child’s growth. Lastly, whether another new discovery may lead to a better treatment or cure during the patient’s expected lifespan is difficult to work into this equation.
The saga continues. The pet owner’s emotional, moral, religious, and financial constraints now enter the arena of determining the destiny of a life. Can the owner afford or justify expensive ongoing care?
An example of the religious impact on treatment options would be Seven Day Adventists’ pets. Yes, seriously. I have had such unfortunate pets where life-saving blood was declined by owners based on their religious beliefs. How does one account for our profession carrying the burden of observing these animals’ demise, knowing we could have saved or helped them? Who do we blame, God? Where is sense?
In our search for the truth, it seems we’re walking on the razor sharp edge of objectively supported beliefs. The truth, the real truth, should rather be based on cooperation and free of fear and manipulation. In order to achieve this, we need to use objectification merely as a guide, under open sensory guidance. We need to place more emphasis on the interconnectivity principle and sense under option (b).
Firstly, we ask: What guidelines do we employ to guide sense sensibly into this uncertain area?
Kill…Why we Shouldn’t
On the topic of euthanasia in people, Kant was of the opinion that ending a life (even if justified under QOL specifications) would violate the respect for the ‘worth’ of the person being killed. He did not specify any medical scoring system to determine this ‘worth’; he did, however, draw the line in excluding animals. One can only assume that he must have considered the worth of a vegetative state bed-ridden human at the time more than the ox that ploughed the fields producing the grains for the bread he ate.
We cannot and should not blame Kant for this. Neither can we lay any blame for Kant respecting the human ‘rational nature’ and equating this with an elevated ‘worth’, as explained by the philosopher David Velleman. This opinion of Kant’s stems from the fact that the person in a vegetative state would exhibit respect to us, based on human ‘rational nature’, prior to entering into this state. We may be pardoned for wondering then, what if the person happens to be an axe-murderer or terrorist flying a plane into a building filled with innocent people. Or, perhaps an animal pending progression to a higher evolutionary state. However, we should respect this and do so (yet, for other reasons as should become clear) by not pulling the plug on the life support system or arranging an appointment with the Termination Machine.
Before delving into the depths of arguments on how to define this respect, who is worthy of receiving such respect to what degree, and should it cross species barriers? Or, if Marley and my dog, Max (who cannot wait for me to finish writing to go for his walk), is worthy of such respect, I concur with Kant’s opinion on this—with only one question: What is worthy of more respect, human potential to ‘rational nature’ or a life itself with the potential to higher sensory understanding? (Max’s tail is now wagging at a hundred miles an hour and he is uttering short intermittent little cries while standing at the front door with a benevolent look in his innocent eyes. What a sensible creature he is, looking forward to simple things.)
Now, just to spice things up a bit and as temporary escape from this perplexing issue, here’s an example of the way we manipulate even sense and belief for objective self-gain. (There is, as stated before, a much more heated discussion acting as testimony of our objective greed in ‘healthcare’.)
Numerous herbal remedies are laying claim to centuries of support with a promise to cure or aid in healing certain aliments. Most of these remedies today, never ‘objectively’ tested, exist merely as a belief in the patient’s mind or money in the seller’s pocket. Their selling factor and hype lies in claiming to be ‘natural’. Besides the ambiguity of what is natural (since all we know comes from, well, where else, ‘nature’), the only good of some of these ‘remedies’ lies in their complete inefficacy. They are either so diluted that in most cases they have no impact on the body at all or their minor unproven benefit does not justify the expense to the patient or the impact on the environment. Fortunately, most of the real harmful ‘natural remedies’ have been discontinued.
A classical and recent example of efficacy concerns is the much used glucosamine in osteoarthritis care (shark cartilage being a common source), objectively proved to not penetrate the mammalian joint to a significant extent and hence only to have a negligible effect (if any) on arthritis pain relief. In fact, a recent large study on the pain aspect of hip arthritis by a group of Dutch doctors has shown no effect at all; the much worshipped in scientific circles evidence-based approach was employed in this study. Weigh this against the money spent on it annually and the environmental impact of the killing the sharks, even if there happens to be a minor physiological cartilage-protective effect.
A patient, plagued by debilitating chronic back pain, confronted by media claims (using statistics backed by recent work done at ‘Green forests And Butterflies’ Laboratories) of a new highly acclaimed natural remedy, the patient has three options: 1) accept and use, 2) reject outright, or 3) accept with caution.
Acceptance can be seen as blind faith and prone to disaster. As said by Voltaire, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’. Outright rejection may be seen in the same light as complete ignorance—the same as not knowing in the first place. This leaves cautious acceptance as the only remaining worthy pursuit—a form of awareness with some detachment. This is pretty much most people’s approach and where, in affluent societies, unscrupulous advertising and business cashes in.
So where lies our righteous duty? In guiding the acceptant ignorant, motivated by false advertising, or those blinded by pure faith or ‘false science’? More realistically, should we not replace objectively driven finance with common sense?
Employing statistics (why can we not get over this?) but relying more on public or patient opinion and a little less objective in its approach are—opinion polls. (I always wonder if, at the introduction of opinion polls, they had an opinion poll to determine their feasibility.)
Again, merely as examples in our quest, consider the following:
Fifty-three precent (53%) of the population of Post Sania voted for Mr Nice Smile Guy, our new president, who opposed Mr Wart on Nose. Work into the equation that another 40% of the voting populace really couldn’t care a kangaroo’s butt who the next president is but are legally obliged to vote, hence our new leader, Mr Nice Smile Guy. If you happened to be living in Australia like me, imagine the further impact on statistics if potentially voting booths were only open for a short time on a Saturday during a period while the Lizards were playing the Bullfrogs (in football).
More scaringly, even evidence-based medical research uses this as their ‘gold standard’ when testing new remedies. If 80% of two thousand patients suffering from (let’s say sinusitis) testing a new drug ‘felt’ better or their symptoms cleared while taking this medicament, it will certainly be cleared for release, pending safety issues. Now try to work into this equation the patients who would have felt better anyway (statistically around 58%), regardless of taking this medicine. Add to this the possibility that in the ‘feel better-taking-drug group’ fifty where on relaxing at home, some were more health conscious or others received promotion at work during the study. Consider the danger that lies in the fact that most accepted democratic values in our society rest on such majority accepted, evidence-based relativities and values with narrow margins; these values then broadly promoted by their beneficiaries.
Most readers may find it alarming to know most natural remedies and supplements on the market have their scanty support in at times relatively small study groups, or mostly on none at all. If they do have statistics (again that word) to back them, they’re backed by obscurities such as recent studies indicating 60% of patients feeling better after taking ground crocodile toenails compared the group taking a placebo (deliberate omission of how many felt better in the placebo group)’. Let that sink in for a while. Here’s another example related to our arduous quest into sense:
Take extra-terrestrial life. I say there are trillions of planets out there with some having such varied and different life forms we can only vaguely imagine and soon will encounter. I back such a belief by thinking: ‘It is extremely unlikely the universe was created (or evolved) solely for the benefit of us, a few lowly primates’.
I continue to say that I believe the main purpose of life is to create sense out of the void. The majority of people disagree with me because we lack objective evidence for any this, so we conclude (the accepted believe based on opinion polls) that humans are unique in the universe with an objectively bound destiny. Therefore, I and other like-minded individuals are outnumbered and out of the norm. With a few more out-of-norm behaviour patterns, I could also be part of a statistic in a study group for patients suffering from self-refutation. Such are the relative constraints set by objectivity.
Unaffected by opinions or eventual objective discoveries about our presence here, sense emerges and will reveal all.
We should note that comparisons based on deductive reasoning as predetermined by Kantian ‘experience’ are necessary building blocks for emerging sense. However entrapped in Kantian understanding of our limits of knowledge and hooked on our recently discovered Darwinian concepts we are merely duty bound to relieve suffering under objective rules. If this self-created niche of sanity is driven by sincere concern for the whole, albeit governed by vague objective values, is it not much more meaningful? Some of us may by now be aware not only of our entrapment in blind objectivity, but also of our rising concerns about how we should go about guiding sense sensibly without complete detachment from objective involvement. The key lies in directing education at nurturing sense.
With objective values so well embedded throughout all aspects of our society, we should however still reveal its evils more fully in our search for an answer. Healthcare and education, combined with nutrition, access to clean water, and fresh air, provide the essential inseparable ingredients for maintaining a healthy world where sense can fully expatiate. A key area, besides healthcare, where an impact can be made (and because it affects our loved ones and us directly) is education. This is under threat if governed by senseless objectivity or senseless sense. After all, it is here where sense is developed and shaped to face the future.
Our children, searching for sense, are confronted from the beginning by the harshness of objectivity with all its cruel intent. They appear to have a brave front, but deep down there are intense struggles in these delicate young carriers of our future sense. With competitive trends set in a monetary-driven ‘tough’ society chasing vaguely set objectively defined goals, the true value of education—its sense and beauty—is sadly lost.
With more emphasis placed on achievement, financial status, and appearance, the underlying fears and concern sensed in our children are more complex than already triggered by violence, global disasters on television or terrorist threats. The materialistic financially driven advertising industry, promoting and setting trends for our youth, creates low self-esteem in a majority of them, and the negative impact of this on mental development and health is well known. To explore sense freely, our children need encouragement and guidance unaffected by advertising with a blatant materialistic intent. They need to do so in an educational system set not under the constraints of punishable well-defined boundaries, but under a reward-promising non-hierarchical system exploring sense as a soberly set main motive. There should be no place for media or other promoted tough ‘muscle men’ or ‘fancy sports cars’ to impress in this schema. If this sounds dogmatically like a form of censorship, it’s not. It’s merely a call to direct sense more sensibly and to care for the emotional needs in those who have less, rather than creating obsessive fixations in those who objectively have more.
Interconnectivity and sensory care have no cultural or socioeconomic boundaries, and this principal should set the basis for our educational system to continue serving a global social function. We should not have to fear young impressionable minds being harmed by hierarchical systems following the primitive rules of a survivalist Darwinian society. If our educational system fails in doing this, besides the unimaginable harmful consequences in the present, our future mental wellbeing is at risk.
A last thought related to education, and interesting to note:
The following great minds suffered from various ailments and would have been condemned by the 1925 Eugenics Society as undesirables, possibly euthanized, and certainly severely bullied under our school system the way it is structured today. The Eugenics Society was an elitist, mean-spirited, racist group whose members consisted mainly of intellectuals, scientists, doctors, and received support from wealthy individuals.
The following individuals would have had appointments with the overbooked Termination Machine. (Imagine our world today without them, but instead with those ‘gifted’ members of the Eugenics Society.)
Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy. Newton and van Gogh were both psychotics. Milton was blind. Beethoven was deaf as well as the son of an alcoholic. Einstein was a poor performer at school initially. There was crippled Byron, pauper Mozart, tubercular Schubert, Chopin, and Robert Louis Stevenson. A long list continues with a deformed Toulouse-Lautrec and many more brilliant patrons of sense (Stephen Hawking foremost comes to mind today). All the above ‘few’ individuals contributed enormously to the mental wellbeing of the ‘whole’ and it’s difficult to imagine a world without them.
Underlying this sense throughout the ages, it is clear, lies a universal need and struggle to reach out for togetherness and empathy and sense. Should we not all be exploring this more gracefully and continually be asking ourselves what is better for family, society, and sentient beings in our new global community? This is the least we can do before committing ourselves to a blinkered version of objecthood as reflected by the majority of politicians and businesses under the influence of blind Darwinian survivalist concepts.
Again, though, what is this sense? How do we to guide our children to understand what we cannot?
Entrapped in our Kantian world, think of something, say, a a human colony on Mars. Somehow, the idea of this evolved in the human mind (deducted from our interpretations of an objective world) in geographically diverse locations out of nothing. Once there were no bells, then bells happened. Its vague origins can be traced back to ancient Chinese culture. However, it also emerged independently in ancient Hebrew, Celtic, and Roman times. Subsequently it became ornate as well as functional and musical, serving as a means to call people together and entertain for religious or other meetings. The idea of this object was initially used for religious calling and musical purposes before fulfilling other utilitarian needs, such as tracing lost animals in treacherous mountain conditions.
Richard Brodie in his book, Virus of the Mind, extrapolated on Richard Dawkins’s initial mention of the idea of memes. A meme is defined as a unit of measuring an idea, its impact, and its spread through a society (our need for objectification). In considering genes as the building blocks (objects) for creating the next individual, the meme is an attempt to objectify human social trends. Therefore, if our brains are the offspring of genes, memes (ideas) in turn are offshoots of mind, creating social trends that spread throughout society, such as the habit of drinking of Coca Cola (the example used by Brodie) or the one we mentioned, the bell.
What we appear to be missing, however, is how amazing it is for the genes in Celtic and Roman Europe and ancient China to originate an idea (meme) of a bell in two diverse and unconnected societies. Our immediate response is to give credit to genomics and utilitarians and say, goodo! In an objective world, governed by genes and memes and driven by a practical usable need that emerged to serve people (finding their lost stock and calling them to prayer) in their struggle to survive, all makes good sense and bells do pop up, genomically driven out of need.
In an absolutist fashion, we gain immediate comfort in our clever assumption. Even if we objectify this to genomic level though, what drives the genome to think ‘bell’? We may have to give a little credit to the existence of a non-objective sense driving genomes, making bells pop up, out of nothing, creating (guess what?) interconnectivity. Imagine under our string theory, with an open structure not narrowly defined by theorem rules, how many ‘bell’ ideas and other sensible missing sentences await us in a more sense and less object fixated society.
However, the question remains- How then such sense in ordered and patterned behaviour of genes and memes? We sense objects and then they appear. Darwin would have been doubtful of our sanity if we had told him that in about a hundred years’ time we would be sitting in front of a little box watching primitive tribes on the Discovery channel. Unrelated in different societies, it’s uncanny how often one person working on a new concept in the arts or sciences discovers another person working on the same ‘new‘ idea (meme). Darwin was certainly not the only mind at the time toying with the idea of evolution.
I hope it’s becoming more and more uncanny to the reader as well how life around us can be so adversely influenced and confined by objectivity when all significant advances and ideas appear to ‘pop up’ in sense in search of interconnectivity and selfless improvement of itself.
Greed is Not Good!
Excess is counterproductive and life offers us many cause and effect examples. I merely list some causes, as the effects are self-explanatory. Overeating, overgrazing, deforestation, eating meat, over hoarding, overfishing, consumption, drug abuse, smoking, needless nutritional supplements, pollution, stress, needless driving of cars, four-wheel motorised vehicles in cities, plane trips for some business meetings in an era of Skype and Face Book, buying the newspaper to cater for the dogs toileting needs (although in some cases it is better than reading it)… The list is endless and this is only a short personal list as things came to mind, different individuals may add different things but I think in the end we all sense the excessive wastes of todays world.
The most inhumane impact of senseless objectivity however, affecting all of us in relative ways at some stage, is seen daily in the crude fiscal decisions made by self-centred objective-driven financial institutions and governments, with enormous impact on quality of life. The antiquated sordid fiscal principles that objectively control them have far-reaching global impact. In fact, this unjustifiable cruelty happens all the time, and people around the world lose jobs daily, starve to death, or are put out into the streets due to arbitrary global or local financial and political decisions.
The current sub-primal home loan recession was the result of such greed and self-serving objectivism. Surely imaginary dollar figures (I can hear the objective-minded accountant types amongst us exclaiming that it was over 3 trillion dollars!) should not affect sense and be a deciding factor in supplying continuous and ongoing mental and physical wellbeing, food and shelter to Earth’s inhabitants. Is it wise to retard sense with object?
Stock markets are classic examples of this falsely created imaginary wealth or poverty, imaginary figures on computer screens going up and down daily to the benefit of some and loss of others. We accept this and perceive this subconsciously as in line with the objective natural selection process at work setting social status. The rich get richer and the poor—well, who cares? Politicians are generally full of empty promises on these issues and to keep their positions secure and the people’s hopes up, they base their tottering security on (guess what) opinion polls and their secular advisors!
With the hard reality of dealing with the core issues of corruption and mismanagement in our larger financial firms mostly overlooked and the unequal distribution of wealth simultaneously ignored, who owns the politicians and the media?
In a ‘tough’ dog-eat-dog society where only the fit survive, in a world of surplus, we create a fear-driven shortage to benefit a few. As we have seen, religion has fared only slightly better in creating sensory wellbeing and fairness. We then call ourselves enlightened, civilised, and ‘humane’ beings. In the hierarchy of many of the major democratic political and fiscal arenas amongst some individuals, slyness and corruption is even seen as ‘smart’.
Corruption is ubiquitous in all aspects of our lives. I’ll use a recent trip to Mozambique as an example. (Wow, how distracted can I get from Marley’s pending demise? Still, these thoughts are very relevant to Marley.)
Mozambique is a poor country, struggling to regain wealth and status after years of war. I went there looking and hoping for an opportunity to start an aid-assisted veterinary clinic. The inhabitants were kind and friendly people with a debilitating malaria infection rate of 70%. With barely enough money for food, veterinary care is unaffordable to most unless aid-assisted.
On one of the remote northern islands of Mozambique, close to the Tanzanian border, I encountered a ‘poor’ community of islanders existing mostly on a diet of fresh fish, crayfish, sweet potatoes, papayas, and coconuts. A major hotel group, under the umbrella of being ‘environmentally friendly’, placed an airstrip and erected a luxury resort hotel on one of the island’s small but beautiful beaches.
The surrealistically-placed hotel, part of a chain, belongs to a wealthy owner in a rich oil-producing country. After numerous visits to the two villages, assisted by a hotel worker who was lucky enough to have secured a job as a waiter, I discovered the extreme poverty outside my luxury hotel setting. I was saddened to discover how little the disgruntled local inhabitants had gained, if anything, from this enterprise.
Only a few (around fifty or so) of the local inhabitants had gained employment, even though there were a few hundred thousand inhabitants on the island. Their monthly pay of around eighty dollars, a pittance by international standards, would have barely covered a modest dinner for two at the hotel. In conclusion, one already very rich individual, having paid off a corrupt government official, was draining more money (with low overheads) by flying in the rich with an approach to take as much as possible from the island—while returning very little to the local inhabitants.
This is just one of many examples and levels of exploitation of the poor globally. On my departure, the pretty receptionist, normally happy and smiling, informed me of her child being very ill with malaria. (The Gates foundation is now actively assisting in alleviating the impact of this suffering in Mozambique).
Under Darwinian principles, the hotel owners are surviving as the fittest. From our standpoint, how do we make sense of this being in the best interest of the whole? There also should be large question marks as to the owners being the fittest, either mentally or physically, compared to the bright receptionist whose child was ill, or her child (or the powerful large crocodile with the big teeth seen in the river, for that matter).
Sense-driven natural selection, based on the interdependency principle and ‘the best for the whole’ concept, would prompt us to ask why schools and hospitals weren’t erected on the island instead. Consider the benefits of affluent sunbathers being replaced by caring doctors and teachers on an exchange program. Creating a better future through good health care and education, the children would be prepared for a new world, to the benefit of the whole (new world). Improved educational services and assistance in healthcare on the island would surely lead to more equality and interconnectivity with the rest of the world. This would lead to more freedom for sense to advance and many more fill-gap sentences to offer. I could only visualise little kids with laptops in a brand new freshly-painted school building.
Some staunch Darwinists may argue that such diversification may create a better chance for genetic expression and survival. Assume that with global warming the islanders profit from a rare gene that makes them able to tolerate environmental changes better. I say it’s better to incorporate what sense their spry young minds may contribute to the new era gene pool of sensory advancement, in order to help fill those multifarious gaps between sentences with re-charged vivacity.
Objectively, we first ensure we have more before we return a little—and then only maybe, pending prevailing conditions. Objectivity governed by uncertainty being what it is, we never have enough in relative terms. This fear of loss and the relative wealth (even amongst the rich) creates a selfish greed-driven stratification, completely in conflict with the universal truth of acceptance of interconnectivity and catering for the wellbeing of the whole. The rich nations and individuals will always anxiously first secure their own excesses before they vigilantly skim off a bit to help the desperately poor, an instinctive survivalist attachment.
Darwinist acceptance of our survivalist instincts, backed by a Cartesian view of the world, is still the order of the day. We fare even worse currently—the ‘thinking therefore I am Descartes’, at least after splitting the mind and body, left the mind to the church. The objective world we live in today almost completely discards the mind’s sense, and with the church’s impact diminished the mind is left, well, senseless to chance or a small group of dedicated mental health care professionals, in turn finding themselves governed by the rules of a precarious objective world.
A life spent with a pet dog or cat, at times up to seventeen years of companionship, can be markedly enriched by a bond only devoted pet owners can understand fully. Marley’s owner has now said her last farewells. Marley’s objective presence will soon be no more than a memory. Continuing to scrutinise this distressing act of euthanizing a pet, again imagine how troubling such an act is to veterinarian and staff when performed purely for financial reasons. Daily, scenarios like these take place, creating a heavy burden on veterinarian and staff and exposing them to suppressed anxiety and stress. In a case like Marley’s, where cost was not a concern with the limited options available to us and the love bond is as strong as any interspecies bond can be, the emotion is one of pitiful sorrow and compassion, albeit full of philosophical challenges, as we have seen.
In order to understand this disturbing trait of humans, to be able to act selfishly and to affect life adversely, then subsequently and rather strangely, sense sadness at the affects suffered, we may try to find security (in objective scientists) in simplistic evolutionary psychological explanations cradled in the natural selection theory. In our search to explain shared compassion, we may then seek advice in socio-biological offerings, such as an excerpt from a text on these matters: ‘Modern man having evolved to live in social groups we call societies, with built-in instinctive counter-dominance traits gratified by equal sharing of resources and an equal distribution of resources’. In principle, from a survivalist point, increasing the chance of (that word again) survival.
Staunch Darwinists may now continue to propose that in times of surplus and with no pending war threats, more phylogenetically primitive ‘dominance’ social instincts (status seeking, nepotism, and aggressive competitive behaviour) within the group as derived from our pre-hominid ancestors, kick in. These instincts prevail under conditions of economic surplus and egalitarianism, such as we have in some ‘advanced’ developed nations, amazingly in turn denying basic needs to others (all in the name of natural selection and genetic diversification).
Certainly, the offerings above on their own may serve as an excuse but are less than satisfactory (unless you’re a Darwinian-era social biologist, I guess) in acting as a full explanation for making sense of the inane greed and lack of sense seen around us.
It also cannot explain the more sententious but simultaneously comforting commiseration still seen in caring or sharing across species barriers, bells arising in Coca-Cola-drinking human imaginations thinking of colonising Mars and the emerging sense of just knowing something is amiss. Albeit difficult to put this inherent knowledge of a beneficent higher motive in words and to define it objectively, similar as with feelings such as love and pain, we can now however confidently and securely and with much relief discard a simplistic and cruel objective Cartesian view of the world. A world where vivisection and segregation can be validated as we now continue our novel journey through objects, fully aware of their workings, not attached to them. Looking beyond this, we now can see how new revelations of the undiscovered universe can easily be clouded by complex explanations of and heeding of archaic objective rules only. We are duty bound to move sensibly in the sense that surrounds us.
Interconnectivity and dependency is an evolutionary driven and advancing necessity that we cannot depart from. We’ve seen how improved telecommunication, air travel, and the Internet are lessening the impact of such economic stratification. It is, however, still with amazing ease and a warped austerity that we continue to reinforce this stratification in a fear-filled, objectively driven, clingy world bridled by archaic financial systems.
It may still be argued by relentless natural selection ‘worshippers’ (boy, do these guys never give up) that competitive behaviour selects ‘the strong’ that may be conducive to group survival by creating war and reducing numbers that could be a burden on resources, and of course the good old gene diversification issue. Any arguments in favour of war, violence, or suffering as a means of genetic diversification are not worthy of a debate in the concept of this book—or any others; I believe sense will reign supreme to such barbaric primitivism. Furthermore, any system based on the scrambling around for a few dollars as a means of a determinant for natural selection is pathetically erroneous.
War prevents us from true sensory virtue and mostly reduces the complete expression of our genetic potential, which we should treat as fragile and not harm in any way. A non-aggressive society is more productive and conducive to sensory wellbeing and advancement of interconnectivity. Therefore, a much more progressive road will be through support, tolerance, and togetherness, catering to the wellbeing of the whole in an interconnected universe of surplus, guided by sense. This is not a recalcitrant or gratuitous rejection of securely accepted objective guides neither is it a blimpish masquerade of a new religion.
The fear-driven survivalist idea, sadly revived to some extent by our discovery of being no more than highly evolved primates, has also pushed religion aside to instead be principally driven by objective financial gain, further creating segregation and more inequality. In turn, this now creates shortages, distrust, and anger in a universe of multitude. We live in a universe and world of abundance, yet create such objective shortages based on antiquated objective fixations. Where shall we place this on the growing list of mental ailments plaguing our society?
Surely, we now can clearly propose that sensory development is much more significant than the mere otiose seeding of a selfish DNA. A sheer objective- gain based DNA will be senseless. A resolute diversifying sense creating DNA, on the other hand, using natural selection only as a tool to progressive sensory evolution and eventually genomic-pressed new cognitive abilities, makes, well, more sense. It calls for afore mentioned harmonious interconnectivity as a means to a better-defined end than vain Darwinian survivalist strategies. It’s our duty to understand and know sense, with emphasis on a selfless sense, not merely an objective selfish DNA with the mind as its ultimate achievement.
I daily experience (and it must be sensed by most of us in our routine lives) that underneath all the cruel hierarchies and selfish and decisive Darwinist actions humans take lies a supreme feeling (empathy and hope) of what should be spiritually correct and sensibly better, much more substantial than the cruel explanations offered by socio-biologist.
This empathy goes way beyond religion, natural selection, or hunter-gather societal sharing. Only one thing titillates the mind enough to propose a meaningful reason for our existence and seems worthy of our pursuit—this selfless hope and drive of a more harmonious benevolent being in sense.
As I now inject the malicious-appearing green liquid in the syringe into Marley’s vein, the sight of tears on her owner’s woeful face challenges me with profound emotional and sensory conflict about my own thoughts. I cannot, however, avoid again bringing Kant into this and Velleman’s interpretation of Kant’s opinion on euthanasia (assisted suicide): “How could what is good for a person matter if the person himself did not matter?” I now have to add—or if the person’s (or Marley, in our case) has value only in objective terms, and no means to sensibly assess its own ‘value’ in the objective scheme of things?
Am I likewise entrapped in sorrow because of a personal loss, recognition of Marley’s situation, an association with her owner’s sadness, or possibly in a narcissistic way my own sense of professional inadequacy to do more to sustain sense? All the palpable emotions in the room were feelings impossible to objectify. Alternatively, personally more plausible, a sense of loss suffered in the deific attempt to succeed in preserving the ‘wholeness’ of life and sense in the universal scheme of things. Regardless, the fact that everything needs everything and that we are all one, way beyond blind selfish objectivity, was steadily being imprinted in my mind. I was also alarmingly aware of the fact that disconcerted objective thinking may be the most serious mental illness we will ever have to overcome as a species.
Euthanasia secures its roots in objectivity, with little sense. Mental pain and suffering is crying out for sense, so where lays our duty?
We need to confidently step outside our objective world, detach ourselves, and start to exist amongst objects, moving freely as sensory beings to find these answers. Interconnected and, most importantly, responsible for the health and development of our most valuable asset—sense. So let’s all cry at the loss of Marley’s being ‘absent’ in sense now. It may be the most sagacious thing we are destined to do, so far yet. We have so much to learn facing the future now, more securely armed with the knowledge of interconnectivity through sense and compelled to beseech sense, detached from objects—into the void of nothing and everything. As sensible creatures, this is where a beautiful and irenical future awaits us (if you sense what I mean).
Chapter Three
FEAR NOTHING
‘It is easy not to feel the afflictions of Heaven, but hard not to feel the beneficence of man. There is no beginning and end. Heaven and man are one. Who is it then who signs the song now’?
Confucius
I have ended a life. I was fearful of having done so unjustifiably under ‘higher’ rules and laws not applicable to the confines of our objective world. Marley would still be present in sense, if not for the objective use of an overdose of anaesthetic.
Many times I’ve had to euthanize an animal based on financial constraints and the dogmatic demands of a pet owner, a heavy burden to carry. I have ‘helped’ Marley by ending her pain and suffering. I was acutely confused and troubled.
Initially I started writing this book hoping to create some awareness amongst pet owners and veterinarians regarding the ramifications surrounding euthanasia. Instead, I delved into my life and arrived at a more insightful and meaningful approach to this mystifying thing we call life; I now have to condemn euthanasia and instead involve my/ourselves with concerted efforts in the wellbeing of life in sense no taking shortcuts. As long as sense exists in nothing and everything, the purpose of everything, how can we do anything but so? Please think about this last statement carefully, analyse it in the context of our discussion so far, and let it sink in before continuing. Our world is a lot less objective and more spiritual than most of us believe.
We should persistently draw ourselves back to pay attention to the mind and its ability to sense and its core role in future development of humanities’ wellbeing. As we have seen, arrant attachment to the objective world is an obstacle to our sensory advancement and causes harm to the most import asset we have, our sense in being. In considering all the complexities surrounding the ending of a life and before considering a stoic or utilitarian short-cut approach to this delicate matter, we should pay heed to define life outside the realms of objective attachments. This does not imply neglecting pain and mental affliction, rather it urgently beckons us to address these issues in a more urgent sense, the state it relates too.
We should fleetingly reflect on the Stoic influence on the-right-to-die, taking us all the way back to Cicero, who remarked, ‘When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of things in agreement with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive; when he possess or sees in prospects a majority of contrary things, it is appropriate for him to depart from life’.
Imagine the confusion this (albeit an objective statement) will create for our Termination Machine. ‘The majority of contrary things.’ Or the following equally ambiguous statement by his compatriot Stoic, Seneca, who said, ‘The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can...always reflects the quality not quantity of his life’.
As long as he ought? What criteria shall we use for this quality?
Furthermore, this QOL factor, with its perplexing, nebulous values evolving constantly and mentioned so matter-of-factly by the ancient Stoics, is still troubling us today. This open to different opinions and very relative QOL issue confronts us all the time in medicine and will cross our path again in the book. I am sure statements such as these made by Stoics, if nothing else, were a contribution to the establishment of the Eugenics Society in 1925, so let us leave them be.
It is impossible to apply the phylogenetically patterned human mind to thoughts on life, its quality, and when to die without sounding either dogmatic about vague possibilities or becoming entrapped in objective arguments. Therefore, we should urgently depend on sense (our only security) to escape these insular evolutionary barriers in dealing with such profound issues.
To the pragmatists, absolutists, utilitarians, and stoics amongst us, grasping at the idea of our human ‘soul’ as the big saviour establishing our respectful status above those of the animals, I offer the following. This also is where my demure lies in dealing with the more abstruse ramifications of euthanasia.
We are faced with two options: start euthanizing people following certain guidelines (similar to what we’re doing to our animals) or stop euthanasia all together. This statement, for obvious reasons, demands an explanation—and the purpose in sense is to do just that.
Some may be equating this sense I’m harping on about with a soul. They may do so if they wish, as long as they accept that all creatures then have a soul. (I won’t confront these stoic individuals yet with the fact that a coffee cup has a miniscule amount of soul, as will become clear.) We cannot deny such an ecclesiastical soul to even the tapeworm in Morpheus the cat’s intestine.
Simply so, because this fraternity of individuals, by the very nature of what their convictions are based on, have to accept the small objective genomic differences between Morpheus the cat, Taenia the tapeworm and us humans, as proved OBJECTIVELY by genetic decoding. Furthermore, where shall we class a human foetus or vegetative-state human (Kant’s argument aside here)—with the animals or humans? If we now continue to exonerate only the ‘clear- thinking, religious’ or hard working humans with societal worth to this deific state of possessing a soul, do some have more soul than others (excluding people with an unfair advantage like Billie Holiday)? Are select members with larger souls than others entitled to platinum cards with no limits, or do we just keep on dangling the old free entry to the Pearly Gates in front of them as an incentive?
Most likely, we’re just back where we started, in a separatist society with objectively determined values set in a Darwinian world, with its cruelty and wrongdoings. In this confusing world, where we can now grade worth (or soul), no animals qualify, since they lack soul (except maybe for Nero, who howls with heartfelt sorrow at the moon every night). The chosen ones are all pietistic humans (let us hope for diversity’s sake that the opinion poll on this was run after the apartheid era) qualifying as decided by the Great Sense Decider, and his Rules are now elevated to divinity, with humans exempt from euthanasia, and promise a heavenly afterlife regardless of all the suffering and pain here on Earth.
We now naturally and anxiously beg, ‘Please, what are the rules, O Great Sense Decider, and, about my dog Hero? I know he’s a dog, but he saved my two-year-old daughter’s life by dragging her from a river after Billy the bully pushed her in.’
If the above argument sounds sarcastic and belittling to some, it vaguely served its purpose. Surely, we can see how senseless it is to get involved in empty arguments about human souls, afterlife, who qualifies and dogs having souls or not. Can we not, as clear-thinking humans, see the logic in sense? We originate in sense, exist in sense and in between, Sense Happens and flows undefinably and judiciously. Sense emanate in dogs, cats, tapeworms, and humans. Our divine duty lies in caring for and understanding this rise of sense as we would for a newborn infant, as long as we have any sense. Sense demands preservation and nurturing of life (all in which sense happens) and our responsibility lies in the abolishment of suffering, not ending a life.
Our thought patterns are set in this vastness of comparative nomenclature and classification of ‘things’ implanted by our educational system. Such minds, moulded by religion or objective thinking, are easy to emerge either confused or as mere ‘minimalists’, dogmatically sticking to and promoting a few hard-gained objective facts. Through the ages, it has also caused asphyxiation of some of our most brilliant minds, causing them to be embroiled in the confines of either religion or an objective world compelled to make money. With such a confusing background already set then (by our educational systems), how can decisions about quality of life become an unaffected individualised decision or an accepted norm?
Most of our educational systems (rooted in utilitarian needs) serve the principle purpose of relaying objective data to students in preparation for them to be of some use to society, an undeniably noble cause. However, it can be damaging if it causes our children to compare objective values and travel through a world where abject poverty, extreme wealth, and euthanasia exist and education then serves merely as a means to elevated self-preservation.
Growing up in Africa I witnessed these abstruse extremes early on in my life. My son, however, growing up in New Zealand, was only introduced to the extreme poverty seen in the developing world at the age of eight, during a sojourn to Nepal. Staying in Kathmandu with its dusty streets and trekking through the Annapurna valley, he saw for the first time how people lived simple lives without concerns about the latest fashion or logo wear. In his young innocence and seeing the poverty around him, and yet the similarity between needs and people, I could sense that he grasped the urgency of reaching out to others. It was easy to see his passionate concern and care, sharing his food and clothes with locals and the Sherpa and urging me to pay more than fees charged. Without such intuitive awareness of the needs of others, all knowledge and objective gain become meaningless and self-righteous.
How do you determine ambivalent QOL in such surroundings, compared to the depressed individual thinking of ending it all while sitting in a penthouse apartment in Beverly Hills or Sydney? Our children come imprinted with such concern, and we are duty bound to nurture this carefully. If we set out with an objective goal of gaining education as a means to financial gain or improving our status (or spreading our DNA), we boorishly ignore ‘sense’, the essence of life.
We should persistently urge ourselves to pay attention to the mind and its ability to sense and its core role in future development of humanity, with the only purpose of the objective world to serve as a mold for sense to develop unhindered. As we have seen, this obstinate attachment to the objective world is an obstacle to our sensory advancement and causes harm to the most import asset we have, our sense in being.
We number objects and money to a point where its absence is zero or nothing and anything we cannot count is infinite. We identify with it to a point where if you have nothing, you get nothing and are nothing (objectively seen). We can even die because we lack it, kill ourselves because we lost it—or be killed for it. All of this while continuously existing in our most valuable asset –sense. Confined by our evolutionary acquired minds to beginnings and ends, we form attachments to objects (driven by fear of not having or running out) we often didn’t particularly need or care much for, but find comfort in their illusory familiarity. We find enough evidence around us to substantiate this imperious approach. We do this to boost our egos, gain a sense of belonging, and improve our status in this gene pool we’re swimming in. In turn, we are then fear driven in losing it all and perpetually live in fear facing the reality of being no more than a primeval evolutionary drive subject to objective loss, facing uncertainty.
Sensing the fatality of attachment to the objective world has driven some Eastern religions and Western philosophers to involvement with practices such as ‘detachment’ and the ‘metaphysical’.
Zen goes beyond detachment. In order to be a pertinent Junzi (a name for a few honoured students under Confucius that have reached top order) one has to study the art of detachment from detachment. Only a few can achieve this and it can take more than thirty years of intense study to do so. Is there a lesson in this for us? The lesson is simple: It urges us to live together harmoniously, calmly, and fearlessly and to steer towards a new area of detached clear thinking, interconnected with the emphasis on sense, not object.
Marley, now clinically dead based on the absence of a heartbeat and her fixed pupils, was, however, objectively still there, but motionless. The impact of the loss of her being was very noticeable, the reality of death sensed in the suddenly prohibitively sombre-appearing room. At such times, the walls seem suffocating and I have to occupy myself mentally with mundane actions, such as signing of death certificates and writing up medical files. Her owner was finding it deceptive to suppress her sorrow and now crying compassionately. Emma the vet nurse’s supportive embrace and kind words were all we could offer.
Ironically, it goes beyond Marley. Each individual cell (with its own stake in life) inside the now mysteriously limp body on the table being gently stroked by the sobbing owner’s loving hand, was in turn also a complex and highly evolved means to an increased chance of existence. Marley was the result of eons of complex evolutionary development. We have abruptly ended this sibylline life and all its co-dependents. Regardless, inside her body, atoms and subatomic particles continued their usual activity. Before coming back to this subatomic world, however, we need to look some more at our attachment to this gratuitous grief.
Grieving the loss of a pet companion is similar across cultures. In a city like Singapore (where I worked for some years) and with an overwhelming Chinese influence or in China itself (where I also spent a lot of time) and where they reputedly still eat dogs, the loss of a family pet is equally upsetting, and at times worse. The misfortune of having to euthanize a terminally ill pet belonging to a young family in these cultures is (contrary to some Western impressions) equally upsetting to all, the same as in Marley’s case. Interconnected, strong bonds exist between a pet and the rest of the family. Often the pet will live principally in a high-rise apartment very close to the family or an individual. The impact on young children and families tenderly involved with the pet is experienced similar to the loss of any family member.
Wherever I have worked and witnessed this ineludible death, be it in Asia, North America, Africa, Europe, Australia, or New Zealand, I have experienced this love and interconnectivity. The life bond is strong, even across species and cultural barriers. Wherever I found myself, be it in remote villages in Africa (where our quest will still take us) or in China, under the charming foothills of the Snow Mountain in the ancient city of Lijiang, the same loving respect was contained in the human-animal bond.
Hundreds of little shops align the narrow streets of Lijiang, occupied by their owners and various displays of their adroit artisanship. These artisans practice their skills while harmonious music flows from their shops with their dog companions laying peacefully beside them. Existing in this cyclic serenity, the life force continues, and when interrupted by the death of a pet, the grieving is the same.
Besides a globally similar pattern then, is there any need for such objective grieving when life ceases? Why are we constantly intimidated by this fear of loss and certitude of pending endings? Is it perhaps because from early childhood this primitive fear of objective loss is so strongly imprinted? Furthermore, we constantly invent new fears for our children and ourselves. Objectively, the ending of food or water supplies, oil running out, computers crashing, the ending of a relationship or a life; all are negative motivators in a universe of continuity with a surplus of time and space and an abundance of resources where sense exist timelessly. Could it perhaps be that grieving has its origins and purpose in none other than sense’s struggle for interconnectivity? Should objective fixations then have any role in grieving after the loss of a life or should we grieve for a higher cause?
Since sense has no beginning or end and is a non-objective entity with its origins in nothing (or everything), why are we grieving? It makes sense in a Kantian objective way but ignores the magnanimity and impact of the timeless continuity of sense, unless we grieve merely to enhance interconnectivity.
Centuries ago, there was no need for oil, but now we are murdering and causing hardship because of fear of running out of the stuff that is destroying our planet! Where is sense in this, especially in view of the abundant energy sources around us?
In a world mindset with not a fear of endings or objective shortages, but an acceptance of the abundance found in interdependency and continuity of sense, will we not be better off? Such grief would then rid of objective attachment but existing in this sense, constantly charging our moral values, eradicating greed, war, and famine and subsequently improving mental wellbeing for all. Will we not become less stratified and self-centred than we presently are under reigning Darwinian survivalist principles? Grieving in this context would not be directed at the I (me) with its objective personal loss, but grieving as a loss to the whole. Therefore, with troops sent off to war, we would fear and mourn not for the loss of a son or father, but for the losses on both sides and the loss to the whole. In addition, can we even vaguely comprehend the amazing future with such sensory freedom—to grieve beyond the object and the self?
I offer a little tale an example (only) of how we still confine sense.
Working in Singapore en route by bus from Clarke Quay to Serangoon, I saw a black-veiled (new émigré) Muslim woman sitting rather solemnly, her eyes fixed straight ahead. Scared to look at the TV screen on the bus showing American movie reviews and even more fearful of looking at any man for more than a fleeting second, she was seeing, but visually impaired. Like all of humankind, she was entrapped in small fearful world of her own.
Typifying the confines of our entire human condition, sitting in a tiny capsule on a large ocean-liner, we are sailing into Singapore harbour. We are oblivious to the world and the universe. Hearing loud, threatening knocking at our cabin door, we anxiously look for an escape route. Not knowing what to expect or how to protect ourselves against whatever evils exist beyond our enclosure, we remain fixed and find false security in believing in our immediate but comforting objective reality. Our entire world consists of the familiar enclosure and a belief in a god that will protect, provided we stick to the rules as dictated by the security of our narrow objective confines.
Through a small hole in the confines of our enclosure, we can only see yet another room, this one is larger, with many unfamiliar objects and another door. With no idea how many other rooms there are and no concept of the world out there, our small world consists of the inside of our cabin and a new vaguely imagined concept of another room. Preoccupied with ourselves and familiar with newly discovered objects in our cell, we prefer to ignore the possibility of other larger cabins that may exist. We find comfort in our enclosure with its clear-set objective rules.
How would it affect our existence if only we knew our small cabin was one of many others on a large ship, our ship in turn only one of a flotilla of ships entering Singapore harbour? Oblivious of the other ships on the ocean around us, we cannot perceive the city our vessel is slowly sailing into. Even more inconceivable would be the fact that Singapore is only one of many yet undreamed of cities around the world, all with boats entering and leaving all the time. Completely unconceivable in a little one-room world would be the discovery of our cabin as only a small spec in a universe, possibly in turn one of many universes, consisting of unimaginable amount of planets and galaxies and more. Our only reality, lies in fear of loss of the familiar, the objective security of our cell, and belief in a less certain god.
Such are the narrow confines of humankind’s present objective entrapment and blinkered outlook on life and death in an objective world.
The claustrophobic fear felt in the above allegorical setting is our present entrapment in a life without sense. With unlimited sense all around us we, however, keep finding some fearful primitive comfort in objective familiarity and control. Where did I put my Rolex watch? In a world surrounded by time displays on computer screens, mobile phones and in cars, why bother with such trivialities?
Such fear is no more than ignorant egoistic clinginess and confusion, mastered by the confines of our immediate objective world. Driven by whimsical attempts to understand sense through objective comparisons in confined surrounds, it cyclically reinforces our belief in objectivity.
So is there a meaningful sense for this cyclic life-death thing and all the struggles in between, driven by fearful Darwinist survivalist concepts and materialism? Some of the ‘soul’ believers driving off to work in their new BMWs may find temporary comfort in their oil shares going up (polluting the planet for others), or the price of beef going up (deforestation for some), or the memory of a hole-in-one in last weekend’s golf tournament (meaningless to most). What, however, really incite people to get up in the morning? Day after day, facing the same monotonous routine, only rudely interrupted by losses of loved ones or possessions, and then finally confronted by death of the self.
God offered us some hope, but the augur of this comfort zone has become less secure. Science offers a flighty alternative. The latest Zara designs are slightly better than last night’s hangover for some or bad sex for others. Shall we then all, like the Muslim woman on the bus, remain ‘safe’ by entertaining ourselves with relative objective ‘worth’ as ‘souls’ to be salvaged in the objective confines of our cabin under the unclear hope of possible salvation from a god protector? The non-objective kindness and pure love I witnessed in so many people (some ‘agnostics’ and ‘atheists’) around the world from diverse backgrounds was all the truth and hope I needed to suggest otherwise. Global amnesia can be overcome, provided sense drives us through objects, resting on their support only and without fear or attachment with eyes passionately pointing to heaven knowing sense is happening.
Benevolence, freedom from fear of loss, and detachment from the objective world all walk hand-in-hand to offer more than both science and religion can. Yet there was so much more to discover. In such a life, we still suffer any loss of life intensely, but in practicing some level of detachment from the objective world we also understand the objective confines of sorrow and our love driven grieve then extends way beyond this in the name of a higher cause in advancing sense.
With Marley now gone, left related to her existence were feelings, emotions, and memories. The look on her departing owner’s still tearful face became more serene.
Emma, the vet nurse, came in and tenderly covered Marley’s body with a blanket; with the other, she wiped a tear from her own eye. Marley’s death, albeit a mere furry canine with the intelligence on par with a four-year-old human at best, left a self-conscious emptiness.
In my mind, all I could replace this emptiness with was a memory of her antsy little puppy figure eight years before, licking my stethoscope at the time of her first vaccination; an image of the vigour of new life. How can anyone still have doubts about animals possessing feelings and emotions? In memory, Marley’s sense (soul) was still present, but there was undeniably more. It was in me, in the walls and the air around us. Either way, it was not astray. It was an objective loss, but in a universal context merely a transformation of energy. Were the vast subatomic spaces present in and around us experiencing an esoteric energy transformation?
Marley’s objective absence was certainly not the main reason for our grieving. So what was? Objectively, she consisted, like all else in our objective world, and the building blocks of all we know, atoms and sub-particles. The atom, its presently known sub-particle state being the smallest known object, is contingent with the objective leaning inherent in Kantian thinking. Therefore, the Marley lying there was soon to be just a bunch of decaying atoms. This change of particle state was surely not the loss we were feeling and our sorrow very unlike the loss experienced when discovering our new BMW has been stolen. Although depending on who you are and your values in life, this loss is much more recondite and not dependent on objectivity. For those who value their BMW above the demise of a dog, I offer the following thoughts.
Throughout history philosophers, such as Kant, have elevated human thought above those of other sentient beings (affirmation of the human soul) safeguarded by aspects such as our unique ability to place ourselves in past or future situations. The ability to do so is referred to as counterfactual thinking by philosophers and psychologists. Pretence, starting at around eighteen months in most children, is imagining the way things might be different—like hopping around and pretending to be riding a pony as seen on TV last night. Pretending then can be seen as a form of counterfactual thinking, relying on thoughts of happenings, future or past (try and get your BMW to do this). In other words, imaging ourselves outside ourselves and the real us in the present moment amid some other image of what we could be or have been.
In attempts made to link counterfactual thinking to human divinity, inevitably then existence of a ‘soul’ emerge again- or whatever other deific auras some may link our elevated status above those of animals. I present Molly, the Jack Russel terrier, for ‘soul’ judgement.
Molly came into our clinic in pain and limping on her left back leg (not pretending to be sore) after a walk on the beach. Diagnosed with a rather common injury, a torn anterior cruciate ligament, she had successful surgery and recovered uneventfully. She stood out above other patients because of her owner’s infatuation with her injury. A rather flamboyant but pleasant personality, Molly’s owner took leave to be with her during her recovery period. This time for Molly consisted of pampering like never before and would make the caretakers of the Pearly Gates consider some serious upgrading.
Three months later, Molly came back to the clinic, her owner claiming she was still limping. After exhaustive testing and examinations over next few weeks, we could find no reason for her limping. She also failed to limp during her visits to us at the clinic in her owner’s absence. None of the pain medications, anti-inflammatories, or physiotherapy prescribed made any difference according to the owner.
The owner finally resolved the problem for us. Molly was pretending to limp for the owner’s attention. She had been caught out by limping on the wrong leg one day. The treatment was simple and successful—negative reinforcement—not patting and giving treats when pretending to be lame, and it worked!
Therefore, if counterfactual thinking can be linked to divinity there will be many dogs barking at the Pearly Gates, and if I ever end up there I’d better take those veterinary journals with me.
Back to our objective reality and no place better to start than with this extract from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason again for newly exposed judgement:
‘All our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skilful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions?’
This is important to us because Kant was prominently involved in discussions on morality and the soul. As mentioned, according to Kant, animals did not qualify in ‘worth’ to escape the ‘benefit’ of assisted suicide (euthanasia). Nevertheless, according to Kant, all humans regardless had this instant ‘worth’ granted based on just being human and their ‘worth’ then based on humankind’s ability to show such respect to each other. Therefore, we show our respect by not euthanizing them, since if they were in a more ‘respectful’ state they would (we hope) have respected us.
In this, Kant immediately excludes sense by placing us as ‘subjects’ dependent on judgement in an objective world. For Kant then, with all knowledge dependent on experience, he still made a rather simple ‘experienced’ conclusion of ‘worth’; an axe murderer, as a human, has more ‘worth’ than Sally, the sheep-dog. Oh! How great this simplicity of subjective objectivity, even to our primate minds.
Although expressing a trend of incredulity of anything outside the sphere of objective realism, it is, however, evident that at times he had to confront (like all us all) the profound uncertainty of what lies beyond experience and objectivity. For Kant, as for many purist scientists, nature, largely seen in the ‘formal objective’ sense, is subject to necessary laws. These laws are objective and accessible to us, Kant argues, because cognition depends on the subject bringing necessary forms of thought, the categories, to bear on what it perceives. Experiencing objects inevitably gives any scientist or Kantian philosopher then the sought after gall and credibility as found in the shaky comfort of an acceptable objective world (an inborn human trait in a world filled with uncertainty and fears). With any novel idea or assumption, we are understandably fearful of rejection. In turn, the critics of such novel concepts will always operate within the narrow confines of objective rules and laws. Our capsule is indeed small.
A classic example of the dust under the carpet of objective science and more related to our quest is the field of animal behaviourists. They openly stated until very recently that too little of animal emotional behaviour was observable, measurable, and verifiable, so they chose to omit it from consideration in their field of study. Subsequently, studies were only conducted on behaviour that could be seen, objectively measured, and verified- what strange behaviour on their side?
To quote a prominent biological scientist George Williams on this matter, ‘I am inclined merely to delete [the mental realm] from biological explanation, because it is an entirely private phenomenon, and biology must deal with the publicly demonstrable’. What he meant by ‘private’ I am not entirely sure but I would hate to leave the task of proving Sally’s worth as more than that of the axe murderer to this individual.
I am sure our prominent biologist must at least once in his life have seen a dog run away in fear with its tail between its legs or a puppy crying at the door to get inside and away from the cold. How much of the unknown shall we continue to ‘simply delete’ since there is no objective proof? The puppy is cold and crying –let it in for heaven’s sake!
Unfortunately, comments such as these, made by prominent scientists, have led to initially ignoring animal emotions like sadness, pain, fear, depression, anxiety, and boredom, all conditions regularly seen in our pet animals and now commonly treated by practicing veterinarians. The approach and treatment is often on a similar basis as human psychoses.
Who needs the psychotherapy in the above case—the anxious owner because animal emotions objectively don’t exist, the patient obviously in need of help, or both? Or much more plausibly, the objective scientists and those who still ignore the mental health and wellbeing in all sentient beings? After all, the inability to acknowledge or to express empathy, are the hallmarks of psychopathic disorders. If all this fail to impress, to the status conscious and socially aware, any form of discrimination and animal cruelty, survivalist Darwinian hierarchies aside, are not very fashionable, except perhaps amongst the Hitler Jugend.
We do need to now, (more concretely) enter the realm of the unknown subatomic world through the atoms in Marley’s now limp body in our ongoing search. Immediately, the need for our evolutionary programmed self-created ‘intellectual comfort-zones’ become apparent, even in relatively abstract nuclear physics. The atoms in Marley’s now-decomposing body consist of familiar objective names, like protons, neutrons, electrons, and other subatomic particles. Interestingly, we do seem to get a bit ‘unstuck’ when it comes to these force-carriers and the vast space between them creating the ‘togetherness’ or ‘stick’ in the atoms and universe. What makes these atoms stick and spin?
Subsequently, we invent more names for these subatomic elementary particles spinning around the nucleus of the atom as the smallest units known to science. We now classify them under the headings of fermions or bosons, the main difference between these two depending on their spin. Their further sub-classification is based on how they interact as governed by their mass, electrical charge, and spin again. These fermions (an electron is a sub-class of this group) travel around nuclei in relatively large orbits, making up the vast empty space in the atom. The bosons (no not from the word boss!) are the real force carriers and among these, with further sub-classification, the gluons are the real tough-guys making up the strong force. Besides the strong force all this classification today has resulted in only two other forces objectively named, so far, making up the unimaginable energy that keeps our world, universe and us together, the other two forces know to humankind thus far is gravitation force and electromagnetic force. That’s it!- our simplistic interpretation of the force(s) that keep our known universe together, and gave birth to, and is sense.
Regardless of such objective terminology, the quiescence, decree and interconnectivity inside this atom is a wondrous thing in view of the chaos and destruction possible. We’re all aware of the enormous energy that can be released if orbits are changed or nuclei are split.
Besides all the nomenclature, with its potential value in this subatomic particle world worthy of mention for our purposes here, is what physicists refer to as a ‘bare particle’. A bare particle has never been found and cannot exist, described as a particle that does not interact with other particles. All other particles, even on subatomic level, create wave patterns of energy and behave in numerous ways in proximity of others, they ‘sense’ and depend on each other for their existence. Sense happens even on sub-atomic level! With complex molecules and atoms continuously in proximity of one another, wave patterns caused by theses interactions have kept mathematicians and physicists busy and will continue to do so for some time. Talk about our dependency on interconnectivity in sense!
With Marley clinically dead, in a phenomenal world she still appeared the same on the table in front of us. Inherent in all of this, still, is a trend of Kantian duress to sense beyond the objective, we continue to create new objectives or attempt to make the axiom fit the objective theorem rules. Regardless of how refined this meritorious search of the subatomic particle world may turn out to be, it’s the sense of order and ‘awareness’ between particles in the vast empty spaces between subatomic particles that remains an ongoing fascination. It’s also to these interacting forces that science, in its objective approach, will always have to return, with more unanswered questions. This remains our quest in drawing Confucius’s heaven and earth together. There is infinite Sense between sub-particles in atoms, in space and in nothing, where our thoughts flourish freely and sensibly.
Besides the subatomic world and its order, Marley’s now-decomposing body had gone to great lengths to coexist and interconnect in similar amazing harmony, and this edict continues even after death. However, energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed—an objective scientific fact. Inside her stomach her co-dependants fate were also sealed, resident bacteria called Helicobacter after eons of genetic fine tuning had benefited from the hydrochloric acid released by parietal cells, where few other organisms could survive due to the acidity.
The acidity of Marley’s stomach acted not only as an aid in breaking down food, but also as a disinfectant for newly arrived and possibly contaminated food and water. Helicobacter survived there by amazingly utilising larger than normal volumes of an enzyme (protein) called urease. This enzyme in turn resulted in the production of ammonia and bicarbonate (alkaline substances) from urea, which made the immediate environment around the organism more alkaline and suitable enough for them to live. This interesting, long-forgotten archived organism, first described by a German scientist more than a century ago, has recently been rediscovered and resulted in a different approach in treating stomach ulcers—and in a shared Nobel Prize in medicine. For us, the significance here besides harmonious coexistence is that, oblivious to it all, and from an evolutionary point, once the parietal cells in Marley’s stomach stop producing acid they also soon will cease to exist; dependency, another guidepost of sense.
Equally unaware of such trivia, and with no access to the Discovery channel, numerous single cellular organisms and other bacteria are temporarily still alive, at least until the indefatigable mitochondria inside them decompose as well. Mitochondria in turn are in their own right ancient unicellular, primitive ‘organisms’ with individual survivalist instincts. These subservient age-old and vital energy centres of cells have adapted to the suitability of intracellular existence and have exchanged energy for protection offered, like a lodger paying rent. Their foreordained fate has now also sealed with Marley’s demise. All these little primitive life forms (containing miniscule amounts of sense) surreptitiously cease to exist without any more reason for protection or energy supply to their host.
But hang on there we just said! Energy cannot be destroyed.
So what does this tell us besides all the rhetorical objective facts? It non-objectively beckons not only to remind us again of the fragile interdependency of life, but also the continuity of life and energy. Some other bacteria and protozoa, living in the colonic and intestinal wall and oblivious to any finality in life, will continue to exist for some time after our objective perception of Marley has gone. In evolutionary terms, all involved have lost, except little putrefying bacteria that now have the task of taking care of making her objective body disappear. Again, some energy loss cannot be accounted for here—life and sense.
Is there really loss in death- in sense? Why these patterns of cellular grouping, dependency and coexistence seen in beings like our pets and us? Was there any meaning in our objective presence besides companionship, having offspring, and exposing DNA to potential diversification?
In a sense, the answer lies in for me, in the constitution and continuity of our sensibility, which we cannot explain only by referring back to the objective mind, with infinite sense in itself unknown to it, and very distinct from the objective phenomena we relate to it.
There is an arduous amount of effort and labour involved in the nomenclature of identifiable objects, essentially to create familiarity, and we are duty bound to continue doing so. In turn, very little attention is paid to sense. We cannot ignore the objective. After all, it took complete involvement with the objective world to become a veterinarian, to absorb objective data, and to write this book on the computer in front of me, my feet solidly anchored on Earth but eyes to the heavens.
Inarguably, it sets the basis and gives a more secure platform for the advancement of our evolutionary entrapment as a species, but it simultaneously precludes us from our full potential (and possibly our only real purpose) to exist and flow in the continuously advancing energy of sense.
Object familiarity or familiarity with objects, therefore, simply cannot be seen as ultimate knowledge. Put another way, objectivism keeps good historical record of sensory evolution and acts as a disciplinary guide to our new sensory advancement. However, it fails to address the main issue in our quest to open up the immense potential of human sensory development into new perceptions. Staring at our feet anchored on Earth hampers advances. It also fails to give a true meaningful answer of how to act and why we are here, to those of us that need one and hopefully we all do. Fixated with such objectivity also comes with fear, fear of loss. So let us confidently and unequivocally contemplate the heavens, knowing why we do what we do and how to act- in sense.
One of Kant's main lamentations used to support his views is that metaphysics seeks to deduce a priori synthetic knowledge simply from the unstructured concepts of understanding. The effort to acquire metaphysical knowledge through concepts alone, however, is doomed to fail, according to Kant, because (in its simplest formulation) ‘concepts based on intuitions are empty’.
I tend to disagree with Kant on this, besides it sounds exiting if not deific in its attempts, with intuitive discoveries more likely to develop our new future than pure objective deductive reasoning. Besides, eventually we should get tired of staring at our feet constantly reminding us of our next step (in fear) and the security it provides. I for one would like to imagine that we would one day be whisking across the universe in spacecraft faster than the speed of light or at least if not transmit our mental energy across the universe.
His remarks, furthermore, alarmingly disregard the important aspects of human and animal perception, such as intuition and the unknown functions of the subconscious part of our central nervous system. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that all of knowledge is based (as mentioned) on unrestrained assumptions initially, albeit grounded in awareness of objective facts.
In general, this is a significant weakness of Kant's critique and of blinkered objective science. The theorem does not stop here, however. In turning to the specific disciplines of metaphysics, those concerning god, Kant explores these profound human interests that nevertheless pull us into complex questions and controversies that characterise special metaphysics. He realises, that by emphasising and setting objective limits (inability to sense beyond the object) and relative experiences of such events in his gracious attempts to dissect the human intellect, that he has hit a blind alley.
It is exactly in these apparent objective realities, as stated by Kant, that lie its limitations. All attempts at proving the obvious existence of objects by restrictive deduction retard us from discovering all the undiscovered outside this objective world. Not only in the context of the re-enchephalisation of the human mind, but also in the settings of a new era in undiscovered galaxies. To our Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon humanoid relatives (and Kant), computers did not exist in their wildest dreams. Imagine all that exists in a vast universe that is still outside the sphere of our sensory perception.
Freed from enclosed and restrictive scientific objectivity, can we imagine how we can speed up this snowball effect? If we can globally awake our minds from this fear-driven primitive evolutionary objectivism slumber, what endless potential awaits us? A simple change in mental attitude, starting in our educational systems, removed from the confines set by religion or ‘blind’ science, and greed is all we need. Living fearlessly outside the body in such ‘new’ sense, emphasising and developing this in our educators and children, is our awakening destiny. In doing this we can also cease worrying about misapplication of nuclear energy, water or food running out, poverty, and global warming, because we instantly elevate ourselves into the universe of surplus using objects in sense. This does not mean abandoning the ship of objectivity keeping us afloat; it simply means sailing along with a more deific and sensible captain in charge.
These limits set by human reasoning in essence then not confined by conditional boundaries in our ‘little cell’ on a ship view of life. We have to allow bold feelings, imagination, and knowledge liberate our senses, not merely mind-set objective boundaries. It is this aspiration (unperceived sense) that has driven us to be more than the objective cumulates of a Big Bang. Driven by the principles of kindness, healing, equality, non-aggression, and goodness, we continue in this sense only.
This does not imply blind faith. It simply sets the mind free from blind objectivity. With a better understanding and reaching out for the good, abolishing war, poverty, and even religion, free of greed and competitive behaviour, could the next 2000 years, with sensory enlightenment and freedom from objectivism, not be Eden? Natural selection and gene diversification will continue with more purpose and the Sensible-DNA will thrive under these conditions of new awareness, its ultimate aim, for once, helped along by guiding the mind’s sense into unimaginable realms of a universe with enough space for all, not an elect few.
Nirvana or utopia itself, in an objective state of mind, is unachievable, but in the non-objective capacious mind it already exists. Who knows? We may soon be taking a quick trip to the outer realms of the universe, a bit like hopping on a plane from London to Tokyo today. That anticipated trip to the ‘restaurant at the end of the universe’ as proposed by the late Douglas Adams may be a step closer than previously thought.
Arthur Koestler aptly pointed out in his book The Sleepwalkers how the human species can go through centuries of non-advances in periods where fear, dogmas and counteractive human emotions reign. Sense, applied to our dealings with inequality, pain, metal disorders, hunger, poverty, and death can and will lead the way to liberate us from such suffering. The invention of the wheel in a world filled with circularity, Copernicus’s universe, genetic fingerprinting, landing on the moon, awareness of animal pain and emotions; these were all revolutionary contingent ideas that changed our perception of the world and the universe and liberated the mind in sense.
Probability laws, like Bayes’s Law or any other means of objective reasoning in attempts to predict events in the future, also simply go around in circles of objectivity and are as such meaningless in context of our quest. There are no ends or limits, except those created by the inharmonious, fearful objective mind. We have never been so close yet so far.
It must be deducted that the sense in all of life and the universe is goal directed, embryoniferous, omnipresent, and runs its course, regardless of our vain attempts to objectify it. Objective guides like genomics and all its offspring discoveries must therefore come with the enormous responsibility to nurture sense to reveal the yet unimaginable.
Instead of bizarre attempts at creating objective life in a bottle from a few basic ingredients only, we can more importantly endeavour to understand the sense it would flourish in, if we manage to create it. In order to escape from blind objective limitations we need to open the way to sense in all fields, certainly not in a bottle. This would include religion, politics, finances, and above all, science. No person should have inadequate healthcare or nutrition because there is no money (objective). We can only slow life’s purposeful progress with sense entrapped in a fear-driven objective world as we have at present. Sense, with its deific aim of harmony and goodness and in the unleashing of unimaginable euphoria in such advanced sensory freedom, has a goal-directed, constantly evolving complexity, the ultimate aim of DNA. Wishful, imaginary thinking? Yes, exactly, what sense is all about.
Sense Driven…Life Goes on.
The last appointment of the day was a dog with itchy skin due to allergies to plants and house dust mites, proven by allergy tests done on a previous visit. Allergies and cancer have become a large part of general practice today. Even in this yet again, we can see the urgent need to communicate and interconnect. Improved hygiene and control of infectious diseases caused our bored immune systems to find other ways of connecting with the outside world, hence the increase of allergies and cancers. (More on the immune system and its part in our search for sense later.)
Practice in Sydney can be intense at times, with pet owners demanding the best level of care while being simultaneously concerned about expense. I existed mainly between work and the confines of freeways leading to shopping malls, or at times to beaches and parks. Outside Sydney, the Blue Mountains became a favourite but sadly less frequented weekend destination. Life has a cyclic routine regardless of locality on this vast old Earth.
At this time I became restless about my routine and Sydney as a base. Sydney is a great city, but like so many cities in the developed world, its blatant materialistic objectivism can become suffocating. Shopping malls can become therapy for the depressed and sports fields at times competition grounds for the low self-esteemed. Sadly, road rage and unfriendly people with minds fixed on financial constraints and future endeavours or perhaps past mishaps make up a conspicuous part of its at times rather stern-faced inhabitants.
A fateful but determining factor in my departure occurred unexpectedly one routine July afternoon. A young man, ‘fashionably’ dressed, ‘artistically’ tattooed, and body pierced in obscure places, arrogantly presented himself and a rather large aggressive-appearing dog at our clinic on that eventful morning. He seemed oblivious to the fact that there were already a few people before him, all patiently waiting their turn. He demanded to be seen right away, overlooking the fact that the dog had been unwell for over a week and he only now decided to seek veterinary advice.
After a rather disgruntled wait, he finally and unfortunately came into the examination room, creating an immediate sense of unease with his presence. A loud and aggressive person, he tried to impress an equally deranged drugged-up girlfriend by being very wise about dog health issues. We had to muzzle the equally aggressive dog (how I wished I could have muzzled the young man instead) he presented to us in order to examine it properly. It suffered from prolonged impaction of the colon, already causing intestinal damage (necrosis and ileus). After being made aware of the expense and risk in treatment due to the dog’s advanced stage, the young man decided to leave the dog with us anyway, uttering swear words on the way out.
Evil exists and it pops up unexpectedly in life, as became apparent when our deranged young man came back later that day. Storming into the clinic, claiming for no apparent reason other than to avoid paying his bill or to impress his girlfriend, he claimed we had ‘messed up his dog’s insides’. After he smashed a hole in one of the display stands and made threatening punches towards staff, he left without paying his bill.
Such a mishap is fortunately not commonplace in our profession and is only mentioned here because it brings an important point home. After this depressing incident, I decided to take some due leave and go to Italy to ‘decontaminate my mind’. Cycling through Tuscany without any definite destination in mind, I ended up in a small town called Luca, from where I continued my journey into the forests on the northern hills of Tuscany. I existed in endless sunny days and starlit nights with no idea where I was or any concern about where I was going. The cleansing effect of the desolation felt when ‘lost’ in a Tuscan forest (they still do exist) is a highly recommended therapy for cleansing the soul.
We do know that everything conditionally needs everything to be and not to be. We can only relate to what is not by comparing its nothingness to what we can describe as something. Sense, when viewed in an objective survivalist manner, makes no sense. This goal-directed universal force is solidly set in its timeless path and we are caught in its grip. It is a benevolent force in an all sense, even if we could view it objectively only. Our purpose is to understand its benign intent and to follow its deific goal-directed path with positive group-enhancing methods.
Digressing from this, as seen in negative expressions like fear, aggression, substance abuse, suspicion, extreme materialism, jealousy, and other means of segregation, is senseless and morally wrong. In responding to anger with anger or violence with violence, we associate with this objectively and remove ourselves from sense. In teaching and understanding this goal-directed goodness, we fulfil our purpose as sensible beings in sense in a sensible world.
When exposed to unenlightened human behaviour, it may be more meaningful to take comfort in the amity that sense offer than to revert back to objectively blaming the still strong presence of our barbaric Darwinian origins. We can easily justify resorting to the latter option, after all, we daily eat many other sentient beings without a second thought. We slaughter these harmless animals in our capacity as non-essential meat-eating omnivores, completely ignoring the fact that they are part of the continuity of this life energy and deserving of a more dignified existence or non-existence and death. Can such large-scale social misbehaviour be seen any differently from the behaviour expressed by our infamous aggressive dog-owner? Reflecting fleetingly on our cruel evolutionary past and its continuing present day cruelty, we should urgently take to a friendlier, more deific route. This is by no means a pardon for our present ignorance, as the truth already exists but is not sensed by all yet.
This interconnectivity in everything, by virtue of its property, entails the existence of all the others. In a system of mathematics even, continuity could not exist bereft of the number 3 and the existence of any number, in virtue of the full set of its properties/structural relationships, entails the existence of every other number.
As mentioned, there aren’t any ‘non-objective’ facts in mathematics, or in science. Given further that mathematics exhaustively and uncannily encodes the world (Wigner's ‘unreasonable effectiveness’ of mathematics in the natural sciences), perhaps there aren’t any ‘atomic /objective’ facts about the world either. The properties of any one thing entail the properties of all the others. Everything needs everything. If mathematically ‘ beyond nothing’ is equated with what mathematicians call the absolute zero (or the empty zero, as physicists would have it), then we will have to conclude, in a Kantian fashion, that even ’nothing’ and absolute zero needed everything else in order to lay claim to a priori experience its ‘non-existence’. Similarly, good needs evil. Both are an integral part of our sensory evolution, the one reinforcing, the other hampering progress.
In view of this interdependency, should we not treat or at least be educated more urgently in how to treat everything and all with the utmost deific respect, since it would directly rebound on us, the individual? Does everything not belong to everybody? So how do we deal with the unaware and ‘unenlightened’? Calm acceptance of their state of unawareness and assistance through teaching are the only options to avoid regressing to a similar state.
It may at this point be apparent that our present sensory perception limits us to a point zero, beyond which we as yet, cannot perceive and barely imagine. Thus, the desperate attempt at reaching out for absolute zero (which could be zeros), multiple universes, and such, are presently out of our sensory reach. Therefore, the needless fear of losing objects and our fixation with dollar values is the unenlightened part of our human existence. With educational systems promoting more awareness of the interconnectivity and sense of the whole, distancing themselves from blind objectivism, will we not possibly do away with petty-minded behaviour as described in the individual above or at least stand a better chance to do so?
Sense does inarguably keep our objective world intact. Without it, atoms would fall or blow apart and basic amino acids, the building blocks of life, would most certainly not have combined as uniquely as they did. Drained of sense and the interacting forces governed by sense, we would end up being no more than figures in a wax museum. The aggressive and evil part of humankind’s duality would dominate if not for this sense and sensibility… we simply cannot let this happen.
The case in support for the above and a benevolent existence in sense, continues when we consider the probability of even one basic protein like haemoglobin (the stuff inside red blood cells carrying oxygen to cells) existing the way it does. With a relatively small 146 amino acid sequence creating the possibility of creating other probable amino acid sequences, it could have eventuated in all sorts of other proteins, 10190 according to Isaac Asimov’s calculations. To form the orderly way it did in haemoglobin, is not only mazing but it would be highly unlikely unless driven by sense. Complex organisms, like a human or a dog as an example, contain around 20,000 different known proteins each with the decree to miraculously coexist in harmony! Natural selection offers a very plausible objective explanation of how they evolved into this order (who knows what other minds on different planets may base their foundations on). However, again the sense and amity in this order remain elusive.
There has been no obvious need, up until our recent evolutionary past at least, to sense the universe beyond the schematic cruel Darwinist and material values. Where science failed, religion sufficed. Now we will have to awake to a new era and the evolving realisation of sensing the yet insensible. To succeed, we should urgently abandon the cruelly antagonistic view of the world we still harbour. Such evolutionary sensory progress may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, considering a rising ‘trend’ in sensing this urgent need for a more sophisticated form of perception and harmony.
Kant again, stated in Critique on Pure Reason:
‘To consider objects of sense as mere appearances, we confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing in its internal constitution, but only know its appearances and ‘sense’ the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. If all we know of an object is the product of the spontaneity of the I, it should be argued that the whole of the world's intelligibility is therefore the result of the activity of the object, and that a new definition of object is urgently required’.
This is today already pervasive as we now hand-in-hand, fearlessly move through objects in sense, in a Sensible gene.
Chapter Four
SENSING SENSE
‘Our senses are the first origin of all credibility, all good conscience, all apparent truth’.
Friedrich Nietzsche
‘A man’s nature is what he receives from heaven. Emotions are the substance of his nature, desires are the responses of his emotions and it is his emotions that have made it impossible for him not to believe that his desires can be satisfied. Thus he will not refrain from satisfying his desires. Therefore when he decides his desires can be satisfied and that will guide him to this end, it must be due to some perception and awareness’.
Confucius
Our gene now empowered in sense with awareness of the ubiquity, abundance, interconnectivity and dependency of life, the question remains what is sense? If I merely offer to say Sense is Nothing and Nothing is Everything, some (failing to see the principle yet) may put the book down others will consider calling me a bit of an offbeat new age eccentric. Therefore, I shall define sense more objectively simply as awareness or enlightenment before we continue with a more objective description of sense later.
Awareness, giving it a somewhat objective tone, relates to a respectful lifestyle, acquiring knowledge, applying righteousness to others, and expressing benevolence through understanding the life principle of benign interconnectivity and interdependency of everything. In order to be thus enlightened, one must firstly be aware of this interconnectivity, detached from egoistic objective material gain (objective gain at the cost of others), freed from fear, worry, and loss, and be benevolent—this also happens to be true happiness. A mind such set free can be happy anywhere and can clearly concentrate on further advancing itself in sense, - there is no more fear of loss or experiencing others as a threat. There is also, with this benevolent and detached approach to life, never any lack and doors of opportunity, previously shut, will open up. If this sounds vaguely like Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, a self-help book we may have read or any other religion in approach, that possibly is since they all, in principle, are reaching out for a similar inborn goal.
To achieve this, we certainly don’t need to be a monk or hermit in a monastery in the mountains of Tibet or in St. Panteleimon and meditate and pray the whole day long. We can be ordinary folk like you and me and be living in Sydney, New York, London, Auckland, Johannesburg, Singapore, Shanghai, or a village in China or Africa. Besides, how many doors are likely to open if you sit and meditate the whole day long on a mountain in Tibet?
The fascinating interconnectivity of life is ubiquitous once we start looking. As I reflected on the assault at our clinic trying to make sense of the still-prevailing primitive human behaviour seen in our big cities and elsewhere, a pattern of group togetherness still governed my beliefs.
Peaceful behaviour is essential in our future development and survival. With it, there will be no world wars or star wars; more like, there will be intergalactic Internet chatting or extreme ESP experiences with benign aliens. The other option is to continue fighting our way through a blindly-driven primitive evolutionary antagonistic view of the universe, with its destructive and negative impact on our minds. This truly is not in line with the universal sense and its ultimate goal of harmony. Continuing on this route will merely lead to cyclic ongoing destruction and suffering.
Whatever emotions I felt as I set off to my home in suburban Sydney was only the result of an advanced evolutionary push, en route to enhanced sensory development. The glittering city lights I was driving into were representative of the top hierarchy of cell grouping. Over four million people, with many minds linked by the Internet or glued to TV screens with their pets contently lying next to them, were all part of a higher organised ‘body’, evolved to improved security and odds of survival but, above all, to an evolving enhancement of sense. On the car radio, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was unpleasantly interrupted by a news flash announcing that George W. Bush had authorised another invasion of Iraq.
Our abstract imaginary ideas precede our advances as an emerging intelligent life force. Ignoring this abstract principle may create a more antagonistic view of the world, with constant fear of lack and not enough for all. Focusing on whatever it takes to cater to the wellbeing of the whole leads to advancement of sense, creating a better new world for all. We need free-thinking and courage to break away from our preconceived constraints and inbuilt Darwinian aggression and dominance. Fine-tuning and changing our sensory perception and enhanced interdependence is the next evolutionary challenge we face. This we can do if we change our thinking on an en mass global level. This means NO war at whatever cost.
Consider the solitary single-cellular organism, bacterium, living in the confines of an organ in Marley’s decomposing carcass. As an example, if this driven little single cellular organism sensed nutrients or moderate temperatures conducive to life, it would energetically and keenly move towards it. It would move actively away from intense light or heat, but quickly towards a mate to establish contact, this is primitive sense in the making.
In its self-centred, solitary little ’universe’ it would, if confronted by danger like too much light, heat, or vibration, move away from these aversions. These primitive responses are important, since they form the instigators of early primitive emotions.
Such primitive and basic emotional enrichment of its little world is made possible by means of its affiliation with a genetically DNA imprinted set of responses to adverse stimuli. These primitive responses, favoured by natural selection, form the very basis of sensory advancement and the evolutionary first step towards the development of more complex emotions.
Note, DNA did not by off-chance favour forming genomes that resulted in positive group enhancing emotions. Embraced in sense it had (sensibly) to do so—to stay in business or die! The primitive creation of sense, objectively interpreted as a drive to reproduce, diversify, adapt or die is easy to accept and should be to any rational mind. However, we should also now see it as a basic requirement to carry sense forward.
The higher feelings of love and anticipation of danger we feel as humans today, the happiness of our pet dog when we get home, and the anger felt during our encounter with the aggressive client. The concern felt when we hear of a new war in Iraq. All these emotions and feelings are patterned to be (and driven) by Sense, desperately trying to improve and advance itself.
Continuing up on the ladder of sensory complexity, more advanced and higher evolved still are the sensations of pain and pleasure. Examples are a paramecium moving away from a pinprick or a fruit fly responding vibrantly to sensing sugar. Drive (sex) and motivation (hunger) are phylogenetically the next step up in evolutionary behaviour. The latter is still much more basic, however, than the true emotive responses filling the top position in the hierarchy of expressive behaviour patterns seen in animals and humans, all ultimately driven to group interconnectivity and improvement of sense. Our current complex nervous systems are the result of this primitive drive to sense, not a freak off-chance event.
If all we concluded from the above is that love has originated as a paramecium in a festering swamp, we have grasped the principle! Likewise, in causing needless pain, religious obsessions, mental anguish, or suffering through war or any other means, we have failed to grasp this basic concept of natural science.
We must keep in mind that Marley’s now long-forgotten decomposing body was made up of somewhere in the order of almost three trillion cells, plus other micro-organisms that coexisted in harmony in and on her body. All these microorganisms, similar to the paramecium, had their own stake and will to survive in sense. Emotions started with such basic sensory ancestry. Life depends on interconnectivity and harmonious coexistence.
The ability of these brainless unicellular organisms to sense, respond, and group together, passed along through eons of evolution by the same sensible force, drive all we can sense and all we cannot sense. This drive to reach out for each other in sense and the basis for awareness was seen long before the onset of any neurological development. The pattern is obviously clear and often ignored, like the long-forgotten Helicobacter in Marley’s decomposed stomach.
These genetically imprinted precursor emotions were purposely directed toward interconnection, in a sensible and patterned manner, to not only increase the odds of group survival, but most importantly, also toward advanced sensory evolution. In its more complex form, they granted us the origins of abstract sense and an awareness of our ability to sense. It beckons us to coexist in sense, and therefore we should promote harmonious cohabitation on a global level as our patterned calling.
These basic little ‘pre-emotions’, starting in unicellular organisms, are driven to become more complex with evolutionary time, and are responsible for the complex emotions witnessed in and around us and can clearly not be written off as mutative chance events. Neither do they satisfy to explain the amazing persistence and order required to eventually result in the human brain.
Sense in a frequently used example in neurobiology, a bit more advanced than our paramecium and yet still quite removed from higher primates like us, is the fruit fly, Drosophila. It has a very primitive brain and yet is quite able to sense a multitude of objects and respond by means of different emotions. This little fly gets tired, requires sleep, has the ability to become ’fearless’ if consumed by alcohol (ethyl alcohol), and appears to be happy when exposed to sugar.
More recently, zoologists have also studied and recorded octopuses engaging in play behaviour, solving mazes, and opening jars to obtain food. These are decedents of molluscs with a maximum lifespan of four years! Much that is known in neurobiology today is based on research done on such basic primary emotions in elementary organisms. Imagine the immense ’wisdom’ and discipline of the drive through eons of evolution only from a paramecium to a mere fruit fly in sensory ability. What can we expect in the next millennia for the human brain contained in sense?
Emotions are patterned and striving for group survival and togetherness and beckon us to reach out to one another and make contact. It must be noted (counter to Darwinist believes) that aggression, extreme wealth, and other negative emotions hamper this universal genetic struggle for sensory progress. In principle, because accumulating excess for one denies others the right to it, but it also creates division and segregation. It must be re-emphasised that aggressive Darwinian self-interest is not an advanced evolutionary achievement; neither does it necessarily advance genetic diversity or benefit natural selection. This archaic approach merely served its out-dated purpose as a more primitive phylogenetic defence/survivalist strategy in the struggle towards universal interconnectivity and sense.
Neurologists have, with the advent of MRI (magnetic resonance imaging, an objective gain) and DSI (diffusion spectrum imaging) shown how we can stimulate certain emotions by selectively stimulating parts of the human brain. Such improved imaging, combined with better understanding of protein functions and connections between parts in the brain and further backed by advances in genetics, is opening many more doors in treating diseases of the objective mind. For the first time since neurotransmitter-altering drugs, psychiatry may be on the edge of caring for our mind’s wellbeing more than ever before. Essentially, what new therapies will aim for is to fix defective regions and, above all, to repair interconnectivity in the brain. This will result in better mental wellbeing and sense, a noble cause indeed. Once interconnectivity is restored, (state-of-the-art parameters for a healthy objective mind) inevitably sense happens.
With all these welcome objective advances, it is still our ‘instinctive’ patterned emotive behaviour (sense), passed on by means of natural selection and striving to advance group harmony and increased awareness, that will guide the way. It can be deducted that with our next evolutionary advancement will also come more progressive and new emotive behaviour patterns and suppression of some of the older ones-creating more awareness. If we nurture this along sensibly, it can create unimaginable (in present day terms) blissful harmony. Our neglect to do so will in turn bring unimaginable hardship.
One human brain, albeit more socially isolated possibly than in the past, can be viewed as only one ‘brain cell’ in the new global sensory energy of a universal brain. It can also be seen how in psychiatry today, confronted by new emerging complex and diverse behaviour patterns in modern man in a rapidly changing environment, the definition of ‘normal’ behaviour could become more complex, if not impossible. Considering behaviour conducive to wellbeing for the group and driven by sense expressed in benevolent behaviour, we can, however, outright reject aggression, anger, jealousy, hatred, and all such negative emotions as counterproductive and abnormal—and in doing this, at least create more order in pending mental chaos. Intertwined in all I witnessed daily was sense that I could still not fully explain (no person can), but am fully aware of now. It is not a cruel world, but filled with good intent, only delayed by ignorance in the unaware.
With our at present evolutionary limitations in reasoning, we must be careful to not limit sense and experience the effect of emotions as merely a survivalist strategy. Sense, outside sense, has ’pushed’ unicellular organisms towards interaction with their environment utilising the benefits of positive emotive behaviour with its beneficial impact on social grouping and a better chance at survival. A pattern is clearly noticeable, calling for ongoing better coexistence, improved sensory perception, and harmony on all levels of existence. Reaching out for heaven here on Earth may be more possible than previously thought, and embarking on this amazing journey in universal terms sooner than previously thought—if we are guided by Sense.
A short summary of the history of Sense then:
Imagine DNA in its simplest form, existing meaninglessly. It starts replicating, mutating, and spreading its narcissistic self. Combining in escalating levels of complexity, it ends up with our lonely paramecium in the pond. ‘Wishing’ science preceded history (and they could visit dates.com), it exists, aggressively defending itself and fighting for food and survival. Utilising genomically-programmed proteins manufactured under directions from its core DNA, it makes models of itself while desperately hoping for ‘hot dates’ or mutations to happen. In full anticipation of new combinations to survive better in this ‘struggle’ we call life, it reaches out for more complexity. It ends up with dinosaurs (that go extinct), fish, amphibians, and monkeys. At this point, either it sounds mundane or that there is something missing.
Now add to this the anticipated hope to do more than survive and replicate, but also to perceive what’s going on out there a bit better. Add to this a drive to improvement of sense in anticipation of creating a sensible creature; our paramecium in the pond finally has some meaning in life. It now, with exited pseudopodic wiggles and a ‘smile’ on its cytoplasm, drifts into infinity, enlightened in knowing that Sense is Happening.
We can now see how basic intercellular emotive responses and later more advanced emotive behaviour seem to favour one thing—reaching out and interconnecting in search of improved Sense. Besides having more purpose to get up in the morning, suddenly our paramecium is now also less fearful and antagonistic to the world around it. It is not a dog-eats-dog society out there after all! Sense is non-objective and we all have it!
The unyielding Natural selectionists will now, with renowned concreteness, proffer that sense evolved to perceive the dangers of the objective world in order to better survive and confront danger. The aware among us will accept this, but with an added sense and awareness. This clearly creates a less antagonistic view of the world than the survivalist objective Darwinist view. This understanding, in principle, should serve as a guide to sense. So why war, religious divisions, schoolyard bullying and poverty, when clearly all we really want to do is nurture sense to improve ourselves (and make love, not war)?
We can now, both empirically and a priori conclude (in sense), that in order for various unicellular and more complex life forms to have pursued the goal of coexistence, even at the cost of mass demise based on this interdependency, there must be some higher scheme in this transmogrification—a goal-directed one, driven to goodness in the classical sense reaching out for sense.
We have so far concluded that physicists have perceived there are forces on a subatomic level that can at best be theorised about mathematically and even then with great difficulty. With the human mind’s sensory ability contained in objective evolutionary dimensions, it’s impossible to analyse this omnipresent force while sense remains entrapped in such phylogenetically determined subjectivity. Established in all life forms, from a single cellular paramecium to a highly evolved human brain, a pattern exists, constantly striving for advancement of sense and interconnectivity—not as previously viewed under our restrictive Darwinian approach a freak mutation with an aggressive kill-or-be-killed attitude. This is our escape from our objective entrapment!
Clearly then we have a purpose and responsibility other than proliferators of DNA in our design. In branching out as one of millions of neurons interconnected in the human brain to other minds, we are further branching into harmonious coexistence in support of ultimately universal sense.
The trans- and post-humanists and other enlightened people (including more ‘enlightened’ members of the clergy and all pacifists) may then prove to be more than just the ‘greenies’ of science, politics, and philosophy, but way ahead of their time. The basis for this would be global equality and eradication of poverty, advanced healthcare, housing for all, and much more. Any alternative seems vastly less attractive (unless you’re anticipating becoming the alpha male on Survival island).
Consider our single cellular organism again, this time antagonistically and fearfully lying in a pond and meaninglessly metabolising in an environment of excess. In defending itself aggressively against toxins and other threatening stimuli, with no more than self-interested survival as a goal, it destroys or enslaves all, including its kin, driven by fear, greed, and worry. Who is surviving for what now? Evidently, without ameliorating emotive responses and sensory push forward in a specific and positive group-orientated selfless manner, it would not have survived. Sorrow would not exist, but neither would happiness, sense, or anything else. In fact, nor would our planet or the universe be here, there, or anywhere, since we would be senseless. Nor would Marley, or any memories of her, have existed or exist, since they would be no more than objects in an objective Kantian world where sense and emotions could not exist. Sounds implausible, does it not?
The human brain is certainly not some sideshow of mutative adaptation or purely governed by natural selection with cruelly aggressive objective rules. It rather is the inevitable struggle for sense to emerge. We are inescapably caught in this, en route to the ultimate sensory perception, no matter how small or insignificant we may think we are in the context of things. Religion, natural selection, and grand design then seem to be different interpretations of the same thing—one side purely objective and the other subjective. Without one, the other makes no true sense, other than in self-interested cyclic arguments, the yin and yang in a Confucius world.
In developing Sense, the Internet, a modern day benefit to sense, should be used wisely if considering the enormous potential of its ability to access volumes of knowledge and linking minds, all in the comfort of an armchair at home—and we’ve only just begun to see its benefits, if we continue to utilise it wisely. Yet, greedy advertising, monopolisation of software, computer viruses, aggressive games, and other moneymaking schemes can be seen taking up enormous disc space and time, breeding moral apathy.
Youngsters are typically hooked on games with graphic and aggressive war themes and influenced by Internet marketing before they are in any position to make an informed choice of their preferred reading. We should be aware that the drive to sensory advancement has and possibly always will (unless a concerted global effort is brought into place) be challenged by constant adversity. In its search for harmonious interconnection, sense is not only confronted by adversity on the Internet, but also in cinema and on television. The aggression and violence instinctively attracts the primeval Darwinian mind, and some individuals in the money-driven film industry cannot wait to please.
These negative aspects in the duality of mind should be seen and treated like a disease or cancer affecting sense. This does not mean censorship. It implies more emphasis on developing sense in young minds in order to make informed decisions. If aggressive war games, graphic depictions of murder, and pornography are subsequently freely available, the interest will simply fade in minds with developed sense. Sense will suppress its existence, should it fail to change.
Without any more complex arguments, it should be clear by now how emotions like love, happiness, sadness, caring support, and satisfaction have evolved and led to group survival and the benefit of humankind. Whereas negative emotional interaction, expressed as fear, aggression, greed, jealousy, war, and hatred, lead to cellular loss, ill health, confrontation, and death do not lead to increased survival and genetic diversity-it simply breeds moral apathy.
All this is not some sanctimonious outlook on life to justify the existence of some new religious group catering for the weak or infirm, but based on an unbiased search for truth and sense. It is well known today how such negative emotions (anger, worry, and jealousy) can lead to disease and cancer to an individual, and most of us are familiar with the distinct trend set in books on self-improvement, promoting positive thinking, forgiveness, and giving. It is therefore also a healthy lifestyle choice. The patterned trend set by our driven sensory evolution is to recognise traits and individuals that have excelled at issues that will help the group in general.
Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Jesus, and many other noble individuals who selfishly existed to the benefit of the group are some examples. They all have in common that they perceived the larger scope of being and the wholeness of things. The continuous greed at times seen in the egocentric wealthy and other corrupt, selfish individuals (a negative force through the ages), contributes little to the group and sensory advancement as they live lives merely of self-satisfaction. Their ego trips and parsimonious pursuit of wealth and power at all cost is misguided and most of them subconsciously sense this as a useless pursuit.
The group-favourable emotions like love and kindness lead to harmonious group responses, bridging cultures and eventually to intra-stellar travel. Greed, anger, jealousy, and fear lead to war, revolutions, destruction, and extinction, or at its best to the retardation of sensory advancement. We cannot help but feel sorry for our little lonely paramecium, lacking an unconditional and loving force with a structured plan, eventually suffocating in its self-created swamp. Abolishment of extreme wealth and poverty goes hand-in-hand with sensory advancement.
Staunch Darwinists in support of natural selection may argue still that confrontations occur, battles are fought, and winners emerge ‘as the genetically attuned fittest’ to then in turn express their enhanced superior genes. Does it do this—leaving losers suppressed, anxious, and depressed, expressing their genes in less favourable conditions? Inarguably, few battles are ever convincingly won, the anger and the wars continue in some minds and mostly it is not the fittest that survive, so ‘natural’ selection did not take place. Stratification of society and suffering is not conducive to our goal of harmonious neurological interconnection and the drive for sensory wellbeing and advancement of thought. As we have discovered, the evolutionary drive appears to be a goal-directed drive to increased complexity and wellbeing for all, with DNA merely an objective means of carrying this force. No selfish DNA or survivalist strategy involved here, other than as was needed in an antediluvian survivalist sense as an aid to emerge from the swamp.
Such an antiquated Darwinian survivalist strategy, instigating fear and in turn creating low standards of wellbeing (or rather ill-being), is characteristic of emotional primitives from the Darwinian age. By contrast, life in the new evolutionary era is destined to get incomprehensibly richer, more complex, and filled with goal-directed wellbeing for all as Sense rewrites our genetic code, mindset to explore beyond the objective realms of our newly discovered universe and move towards advanced sensory perception together.
The real intellectual challenge ahead certainly does not lie in hedonistic bliss or the survival of the fittest strategies for Darwinists, but in how to re-encephalise emotive behaviour (group dependent) and our cerebral perceptive ability in ways to serve life as a complete and healthy whole in search for extra-sensory cognition. This will result in wellbeing and a blissful existence for all.
You the reader and I (the world) should in summary at this point face the future with five valuable basic concepts as driven by sensory evolution:
1) Everything is interconnected and interdependent, respect this fully and practice tolerance.
2) When confronted with what is right or wrong, assign what is best for the whole, think on a global level without boundaries.
3) There is a Sense in and between objects, so move freely ‘through’ objects with minimal attachments in a fearless pursuit of this sense. Reject fear by practicing some form of detachment from the objective and become more dependent on sense, there is enough for all of us.
4) Develop sense as a whole, with emphasis on equal and fair education and the physical and mental health and wellbeing of all sentient beings.
5) Be driven by unattached knowledge, benevolent, free of inequality, criticism and self-interest, and share this knowledge freely, openly and respectfully with others.
A future faced by applying these principles en mass would deliver a goal-directed calm society, not driven by greed, worry and fear. Uncertainty and confusion would fade, our combined purpose would seem more meaningful and the euphoria of nurturing our developing sensibility in an environment of respect, with a global cause, pursued with more care. Our knowledge will expand in helping others, creating happiness and mental wellbeing for all.
We can now solve world poverty and make un-bias decisions in dealing with potential environmental issues and food and water shortages. Take pity on the miserable, aggressive, selfish, fat and lonely little paramecium in the swamp.
Chapter Five
FREEDOM to EXIST and COMMUNICATE
(Time in Africa)
‘Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart’.
Confucius
In this short chapter, a sojourn with an enormous influence on my road to sense.
My veterinary career started in Africa, the birthplace of our pre-hominid ancestors, historically confronted by ongoing strife and arguably the most challenging and interesting place left on Earth.
Being a vet has not only given me an excellent background to pursue an interest in evolutionary biology, but also the fortune to travel and meet different people in different parts of the world. Born in Africa, I will always continue to respect the privileged education and fond childhood memories this wonderful, vast, and vibrant continent and its people granted me. My first encounter with private practice takes me back to the African savannah, on the border between South Africa and Botswana.
It was 1987, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, and the corrupt impact of apartheid’s covetous evil was still omnipresent. It existed like a throbbing cancer affecting the lives and troubling the minds of all the people trapped in its restrictive grip. Apartheid, like Nazism and Stalinism, was an example of how segregation is an erroneous intuition. Wherever segregation is deliberated, be it through religion, socio-political or economical, inequality will objectively exist. Dominance and suppression in order to maintain group (or individual) superiority is similar to surgically resection a heart or pancreas and trying to let the organism survive segregated from its organs. It will always result in failure causing revolution, war and suffering and reveal itself as completely pointless in the long-term. Remember: everything needs everything else, and conflicting behaviour has its origins in fear.
The misapplication of Darwinian concepts has its origins (excuse the pun) blemished by fear and the overwhelming impact of having to deal with our animal ancestry and rejection of antiquated religious beliefs. The new mindset has given some criminally minded individuals often high-powered leeway to justify in their own selfish minds’ personal greed, corruption, supremacist ideas and white-collar crime as worthy survivalist strategies, if they can get away with it. They see life on Earth through primitive eyes as the ultimate materialists and protectionists, ending with the finality of death. Nowhere could this be better seen than under the narrow-visioned system of apartheid in South Africa.
The fact that a multi-cellular organism with different organs forming part of a social group of organisms has a better chance of survival is unquestionable. The fact that emotions like anger, aggression, and jealousy, whether individual or group directed, are detrimental to the wellbeing of the individual, group, or social system and its ultimate goal to improved sensory perception is equally true. The reason Nazism and apartheid failed was not only because of one group winning a violent war, group domination, or even simply pure force-directed justice.
More likely, it emerges as a necessary non-objective underlying ‘universal sense’ of truth (often retarded by human negative behaviour) that ultimately reigns. Justice, however, is completely objective and relative, if open to debate and human manipulation. Remember how many fill gap sentences we can debate. Idealising group behaviour in a Kantian sense will also not suffice to explain how throughout the ages great scientific discoveries appeared suddenly, apartheid toppled, and the Berlin wall came down. We can see how the Kantian notion that through the determination of pure intuition we obtain a priori perceptions of objects is simply insufficient to explain the drive of evolutionary biology.
As we have stated before, the same way a greedy little cancer can destroy an entire organism, so too does selfish human behaviour destroy society.
As a young vet working in Africa, I could witness aspects of anthropology, created by the cultural diversity and complexity of a society under adverse conditions, affected by an array of diseases.
Natural selection offers us statements like ‘predators seem beautifully designed to catch prey animals while the prey animals seem equally beautifully designed to escape them’; this description about as aesthetically explicit as any Darwinists can get. Whose side is god on the hunter or the hunted? This query is proof of his purist, objectivist, black-and-white outlook on life and science. Pure objectivity will prompt us to ponder such ludicrous questions. Equally so, being objective would be to blindly believe that conflicting religion or natural selection should suffice to answer or replace god’s ambiguity. Such a basic and antagonistically separatist view of the world creates as many gaps as it fills. Natural selection ‘worshippers’ continue to use these self-induced gaps as ammunition against creationists and refer to them as sky-fairy gap-fillers. This is typical of the primitive Darwinian mind when it has reached a seemingly comfortable objective niche.
An obvious question is whether without conflict, disaster, or ‘bad’ emotive behaviour natural selection and gene selection can continue. Do natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes or other cataclysms necessarily select the fittest to survive? Are the powerful and rich in the world today the ‘fittest’ and entitled to more privileges and to the power of having more influence over acts and decisions that could affect our future and gene expression? Are wars, famines, and natural disasters the only ‘means’ of population control, selecting the strong and acting as a chaperone for genomic adjustments from time to time, or is it not more challenging and civilised to see how we can share the abundance of our universe equally through our developing sense and sharing knowledge- with sense in control? Would genomic adjustments conducted under harmonious and stable conditions not serve as more sublime pointers to our enriched sentiency? The answer, to me anyway, is obvious.
Would it not be better to have knowledgeable, qualified, and organised thinking lead the way; rather than politicians elected on a money/power basis that are mostly greed, survivalist, nepotistic, or fear driven based on all the evidence available to us? Would global acceptance of a deific force attempting ultimate sensory advancement, or even a grand design, not make more sense? (At least until we can offer more than worn-out natural selection and Darwinian principles as a guide to explain the harsh realities and complexity of life.)
Throughout the ages, many philosophers have questioned not only our existence but also how we should exist. Contrasting Kant’s views, one such a philosopher is Spinoza. Of Portuguese Jewish descent, he spent most of his productive life in a small apartment in The Hague, in the Netherlands; he may have had a better concept of sense than Kant did. Spinoza, in his writings, already approached the mind as being an idea of the human body, hinting towards the importance of an evolutionary formation of the brain as an achievement of the body to obtain more complex sensory development. Spinoza also realised the fact that we had the ability as humans to override the at times tyrannical automaticity of the human brain. Spinoza spoke about feelings and the ability to express control over emotions where the organism can wilfully strive to control emotions in order to obtain better harmony for the organism and the group. He, ahead of his time, described a being in sense.
In contrast, as we have seen, survival of the fittest in a Darwinian sense is an antiquated existentialist and narrow view of evolutionary biology. It inarguably creates some room for acceptance of apartheid, Nazism, eugenics, and other extreme forms of negative sensory expression under the influence of forceful regimes. It attaches too much objective meaning to the brain. It inevitably gives substance to negative ideas like group superiority, segregated societies, and political and economic superiority. It leaves the duped brains of greedy stockbrokers and the businesses run by such individuals with the pretence that greed is good. The post-Darwinian phase of our evolution should embrace kindness, fairness, freedom of thought, togetherness, and new awareness of the metaphysical. (In principle because the only way forward is to realise yet again our mental limitations based on our evolutionary background.)
There is an urgent call for breaking down global stratification and establishing universal equality way beyond the fall of apartheid and globalised economies. The demise of Nazism and apartheid are only two of many examples and relatively small gains in recent advances of our sensory evolution. We are duty bound to go much further next and support the mentally unwell, weak, underprivileged, and poor unequivocally and globally. Looking objectively again only at equivocal financial pros and cons of regionalised centres in a globalised economy is prone to failure, unless conducted in sense with equality and fairness for the global whole as the principle motive.
To some evolutionary biologists and socio-anthropologists, the human emotion of sadness and upset expressed when witnessing a starving emaciated African infant or a little Chinese girl trapped under rubble following an earthquake is no more than a weakness and a concern of such adversity reflected back to us. We now understand that the origins of such concern, however, are truthful, pure, and an inevitable product of our orderly evolutionary destiny in sense and veritable concern for the whole.
Africa is a continent that has endured and is still suffering its share of human cruelty and neglect. It’s to some extent still undeveloped and unspoiled in many places, but is simultaneously exploited by political greed and ruined by ongoing wars and famine. It has so much potential—without greed—under guidance of sense.
It was on these southern African plains then, at a time still troubled by the iniquitous presence of apartheid, close to a place called Taung, where I found myself equipped with a newly obtained veterinary degree (and not much else) in the mid-1980s. I started my endless search for the meaning of life in what appeared at the time as senseless chaos under the influence of apartheid in those parts.
Taung is a remote village, more or less in the centre of the southern tip of Africa. Its claim to fame is the discovery of the three-million-year-old Taung skull, Australopithecus africanus, by Dr Raymond Dart in 1924.
An image of Dr’s Dart or Leakey, clad in khakis and chiselling away at antiquity under the blazing African sun, inevitably comes to mind in this arid part of the savannah with its fragrantly dusty smells and often suddenly appearing late afternoon thunderstorms. It was with this fresh invigorating smell hanging in the air one late afternoon that Ernest, my veterinary assistant (also serving as interpreter), and I huddled around a small woolly creature on these ancient plains. The creature was the lifeless remains of a sheep found dead by a concerned indigenous farmer.
In areas, where anthrax is endemic, veterinarians will always conduct a post mortem on a ruminant by means of left-sided abdominal incision because of this nasty infectious disease. If the spleen is grossly enlarged and black in colour, the rest of the autopsy is abandoned and a preliminary diagnosis of anthrax contemplated. This leaves an ashen-faced vet running to the laboratory hoping for affirmation of it not being the case and wondering what sort of gruesome pathology made its use so attractive to megalomaniacs, terrorists, and warmongers.
With such scenery stimulating thought of the origins of man, a survivalist philosophy would seemingly prevail. Yet many a predator has hunted and killed its prey on these ancient lands and did so with edifying grace and serenity, not because of it being fitter or stronger, but with an honoured, ancient dignity in the need of food to survive and continue the drive of evolving sense. Predators such as lions, leopards, and cheetahs will only kill when needed and then, if analysed in a survivalist fashion, driven by fear of hunger and starvation. I always found it enchanting as a child, when travelling with my dad across these plains of Africa, to see how a herd of Impala antelope with a few buffalo in between, almost like the Garden of Eden, would calmly graze close to a tribe of lions after a recent kill. The simple reason for such calm is group sense, crossing species barriers, of respect and understanding that taking from the system was necessary and essential. Greed and cruelty does not ‘naturally’ exist.
In contrast, humans are inclined to take in needless excess and at times, maim, torture, punish and kill in anger or fear. They then even go as far as photographically recording such gruesome images of our shameful and reprehensible barbarism and then in turn, even more amazingly, continue to entertain warped cinemagoers with these images, or use them for propaganda purposes. Such individuals or persons inflicting pain, torture, or punishment (and they do exist outside the movies based on my experiences) are driven by fear—fear that was imprinted during childhood or some other phase of deprived emotional development. This group of fortunately vastly outnumbered individuals, also lack the ability for their minds to control their negative emotions and thus let primitive survivalist emotive behaviour, only designed for use in urgency, direct their fear and anger. Apartheid was essentially a system driven by fear of black domination with fear and anger reigning on both sides.
Equally horrible and amazingly well excepted by our species is the way the media graphically depict negative emotive behaviour like war, torture scenes, murder, rape, and all forms of deviant crime scenes, often deliberately drawn out for the viewers’ gratification. How can people, in a world so filled with imagery richness and so many centuries of noble tales to tell and with communication-means so advanced, waste their time repetitively making and watching movies or TV shows with violence and aggressive behaviour, as is the common trend? As this is an undeniable part of our cruel Darwinian past, can we not store it in museums to serve merely as reminders of our barbarism? Why introduce our children to extra-terrestrial life depicted as aggressive invaders and warmongers, out to destroy the Earth, when the same hostile elements are seen in only the most primitive of life forms?
Knowing the ultimate goal of evolution’s driving force is group formation from unicellular to multi-cellular organisms, organs, and complex societies to harmonise in one-world, maybe one day peaceful intergalactic contact with a yet unimaginably advanced sensory perception will take place. Why not develop and open the imagination to such themes of enormous potential and still reflect the human drama in less fear evoking ways (remember ET).
Plausible arguments by gifted astrophysicists like Hawking or philosopher psychologist William James and others have profoundly and nobly delved into such issues as life elsewhere in the universe, but were unfortunately always obliged to relate back to objective mathematical reasoning in order to obtain acceptance in objectively defined environments. It leaves the question unanswered. Acceptance of our past restrictive sensory limitations and its looming extrication is more befitting of our unconfined sensory quest.
It truly would be naive to think that the universe was ‘created’ solely for our own benefit. It should be clear especially when surrounded by the abundances and diversity of life in Africa that life and mutations are not some off-chance event. It is equally naive to reason that because of natural selection we were ‘lucky’ enough to have life originate on our uniquely located planet. More likely, a universal, distinct, and clear sensible pattern is repeatedly expressed innumerable times elsewhere in the vastness of our universe (or multiverse, as is seen in every atom and molecule in and around us). We have so far only seen its more primitive unsophisticated, fear-driven and aggressively viewed origins. We are only still looking up to Mount Improbable to quote Stephen Hawking on this:
‘The height of Mount Improbable stands for the combination of perfection and improbability that is epitomized in eyes and enzyme molecules (and gods capable of designing them). To say that an object like an eye or a protein molecule is improbable means something rather precise. The object is made of a large number of parts arranged in a very special way. The number of possible ways in which those parts could have been arranged is exceedingly large. In the case of a protein molecule, we can actually calculate that large number.’
As mentioned before the late Isaac Asimov did so for the particular and relatively simple protein haemoglobin found in red blood cells. It is 10190! If we take the human eye, it is unimaginably large. The actual, observed arrangement of parts is improbable in the sense that it is only one arrangement among trillions of possible arrangements.
Objectively looking at designing a haemoglobin molecule then with all the probabilities, would make it an extremely unlikely off-chance event. The complexity of an eye and the possibility of all the numerous proteins it consists of arranging itself the way they did is as unimaginable as is the vastness of the universe itself and require immeasurable sense behind it.
Natural selection records in a plausible way how it objectively happened, but tends to vilify the amazing goal-directed order and sense behind it all. However, with sensory advancement as an unpresumptuous purpose, not only does it create space for natural selection and the subjectivity of religion to coexist, but it also grants much more freedom for discreet sensory advancement. Ironically, the troubling thing about natural selection is not the concern that it is wrong but the fear we sense in that it might be right, therein lay our search for a less confined definition. So in sense we now ask, why then feel fear in the allure of such goal-directed complexity surrounding us. I am certain, and personally feel much more secure in the Sensible gene, having given us guidance that is more benevolent and meaningful in its reconciliation than the harshness of an outright objective Darwinian world.
It was not anthrax at least. The spleen was small and normal in colour. In fact, the carcass was, besides being emaciated, quite normal looking and free of any obvious gross pathology. We were about to take biopsies from the different organs to send away to a pathology lab when Ernest noticed freshly regurgitated rumen contents in the oral cavity. Further dissection of the oesophagus revealed it to be grossly dilated and also filled with regurgitated rumen content. A diagnosis became apparent.
In this part of Africa on the South African/Botswana border, close to Namibia, semi-arid conditions and droughts create extremely adverse conditions for African farmers. Under the apartheid regime, their nomadic lifestyles were restricted and surrounded by land owned by ‘white’ South African farmers, it creating desperate situations for them and their livestock. Herds exposed to such extreme situations are forced to eat plants they would normally instinctively avoid. In this case, Geigeria omativa (or the Vermeer disease bush), a hardy and toxic bush that survives dry and over-grazed conditions and is mostly instinctively avoided, also in part because it isn’t very palatable. Therefore, it is only eaten in desperation, just before starvation. Vermeer (vomiting) is a term derived from the first Dutch settlers that had to endure the same hardships as this African tribesman about two hundred years before on their arduous Great Trek inland. This bush contains a toxin that causes paralysis of skeletal, heart, and oesophageal muscles, and thus death due to asphyxiation and bronchopneumonia.
Feeling completely helpless, I turned to the weatherworn, deeply lined face behind me. How do I explain to the kind but impoverished farmer that after a six-year university education, I cannot help him at all? How do you treat starvation with no food and how do you philosophize about the morals of knowing that in other parts there is excess? Had Ernest or I the money or means, we would have at that point gladly driven in truckloads of hay from the more privileged white farmers about a hundred kilometres east of where we were. Sadly, all we could do was stand back while Ernest explained the situation in Tswana. We drove off into the orange-red African sunset, silently absorbing its beauty, albeit our spirits dampened by a sense of our own human inadequacies.
Pondering the meaning of life is a quest well boosted by experiencing the intense fragrance and colours of an African sunset. The colours, comparable to an impassioned converse between Matisse and van Gogh, expressing their emotions in intonations of their favourite yellows and orange on canvas, is something I have not experienced in a similar manner in any other part of the world. The acacia trees were silhouetted in the foreground and the aromatic smell of a mixture of bark, dust, and a plant root so typical of Africa were sensually cleansing to a point where all the world’s problems seemed frivolous and everything appeared timeless. A bumptious careless DNA as a cause of all this aesthetic splendour indeed seems rather pathetic if not tragic.
We pulled over and leaned back on our vehicle, assimilating this deific emotional high. I reflected then on how in this universe of plenty everything alive on this vibrant continent and planet by its very existence, although often challenged by hardship, still thrived in an atmosphere of tranquillity, hope, harmony and love. A mere three hundred kilometres away, Soweto was burning and people were being killed for no obvious reason.
Insistent knocking at the door woke me early the next morning. With sleepy eyes, I confronted a local police officer informing me in broken English of a badly burned dog in need of veterinary care in the back of their van. The burn wounds I saw that morning covered the majority of the back of the crossbreed dog. Its mournful and helpless appearance stirring reason to doubt if any concrete reasoning is behind what we often fleetingly try and explain as god or nature’s way. It had been caused by an incident where a group of vigilantes burned down a hut belonging to a man in the local village whom they assumed was an informer for the South African regime at the time. The dog was an innocent victim. The occupants of the hut, an elderly man and his family, where all killed in the event and the agonized dog the only maimed survivor.
The morphine-boosted drip running into the pitiful and disfigured little creature’s vein on the table in front of me was most likely not enough, but all I could offer besides stroking its head and cleaning its wounds. I realised the futility of the whole enterprise. Turning to the drug cabinet to reach for the bottle of euthanize, I realised that Ernest was standing right next to me. Placing a strong hand on my shoulder, he uttered, “No” with an unusual firmness.
Facing Ernest, I stopped as I noticed a slight wetness in his eyes, possibly brought on by the intense emotions in the village at the time. I realised then that in some way he wanted to make better what was so wrong. His suggestion was for us to try and save the dog. Without hesitation, I turned back to the cabinet and started searching for an antibiotic wound-ointment and more ampoules of morphine.
Ernest, a Xhosa, was intelligent, tall, and one of the most open and sincere people I have ever met. I always felt deeply troubled by the knowledge that if he had been born in a society where fairness and justice prevailed he could possibly have been one of the most compassionate vets or doctors of the day, positively influencing many lives around him in desperate need of care. Besides, I may have had the privilege to meet him years before as a fellow student. Such was the sad destiny that apartheid bestowed on us. It was Ernest’s loving care, supported by regular antibiotic administration and bandage changes, that eventually caused the wounds to heal, and we saved our burn victim after nearly two months of diligent care.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) is, along with J.G. Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel, one of the three most influential thinkers in the tradition of ‘German Idealism’. Schelling was, in fact, an impressively rigorous logical thinker and like Spinoza had opinions different from Kant’s on many issues. Schelling's work from his middle period (1809-1827) is usually referred to as the philosophy of the Ages of the World (WA = Welt alter), after the title of the unfinished work of that name he worked on in this period.
Schelling is important to us because his glowing digression from Kantian thinking can be seen in the following exert from his own Critique of Pure Reason:
‘What we call the world, which is so completely contingent both as a whole and in its parts, cannot possibly be the impression of something which has arisen by the necessity of ‘reason’...it contains a preponderant mass of unreason. This the objective world cannot explain.’
A few months later, Ernest told me how our ‘burn-victim’ patient, after making a full recovery, was happily living as a well-loved pet in their household. One bright sunny afternoon, some weeks later, it killed a Cape cobra only a few meters away from where his complacent four-year-old son was playing. Without intervention from the dog, the incident most certainly would have led to a fatality in this remote part of the world where anti-venom was not readily available. Kindness and love in some obscure way always recycles back into the universal drive for love and togetherness. Likewise, ongoing evil deeds will create unfordable delay in our blissful prescience. I firmly belief that our ‘civilisation’ is built not on wars that were won or lands that were conquered, but on the love and kindness strengthened by such events; and kindness always return to the donor.
My life at that time in Africa was a rather surrealistic experience. The modern-looking building I approached, oddly misplaced considering the norm for this part of southern Africa, was the staff quarters of an agricultural university in Bophuthatswana. I found myself there sharing an apartment with Simon, who was in charge of the Academic Development Centre at the university. He was also living proof that the gene that decides homogonous sexual preferences was in some arcane way linked to creativity. In appearance a cross between a member of ‘60s band ZZ Top and Ghandi, with pale skin and a long ginger beard, he was always colourfully draped in a sarong when not at work. It was indeed an unusual sight for that part of the world. Besides his artistic and literature talents, he concocted meals in our little kitchen that would have created a spanking write up in any New York or Parisian restaurant guide. As I entered our self-contained accommodation, I walked almost straight into a slim, young, naked female body.
In freeing ourselves from the nightmarish legacy of our evolutionary past, we could choose to enjoy a lifetime of all-consuming mind simulated unexpected orgasmic bliss and beauty. It has been suggested that such a dopaminergic contained hedonistic imperative in a post-Darwinist world would be continuously ecstatic and possibly would require nothing more than swallowing a small tablet in years to come. Genetically pre-programmed euphoria would be as natural and inevitable as breathing. We would simply be happy about being happy. In the meantime, and before our further exploration of this possibility later in the book, I thrived on what life in sense offered.
As I visually absorbed the shapely body that belonged to Lisa, one of Simon’s gay friends (unfortunate for the gene pool and natural selection), I reflected on my strange little world. Her exhibitionism was just part of her way of expressing innocence, aestheticism and closeness to nature, some sort of experimental objection to ‘austerity’. Besides the delicious food, an evening full of promise was waiting, filled with some of the most refreshing talks I would ever encounter. We covered everything from philosophy and art to lust and the purpose of our existence.
The thick volumes and long hours of studying to become a vet did not in my wildest dreams prepare me for such open richness (albeit strangeness) of being as I encountered in those days. There I was sitting on the vast plains of Africa in the company of a beautiful naked woman, drinking a fine red wine while having all my epicurean needs catered for by an intelligent, caring gay man in a sarong, rather strange, but part of my sojourn to the present. The innocence, the lack of greed (most staff members gave up much better paying jobs in South Africa, the UK, U.S, or other parts of the world), and the simple connection between intellectual minds created an utopia that will always bring back the fondest of memories. An existence such as I had then also imprinted on my mind that utopia can exist and that humankind, removed from greed with less hierarchical academic, economic and political induced stratification, can speed up such a blissful coexistence-if we join hands in Sense.
To explain the emergence of an intelligible new world at the same time as coming to terms with the mind’s inextricable relation to matter and its limitations can be, as we have seen, restricted by our phylogenetic limitations. However, at times we find ourselves in invigorating and enlightening environments where limitations seem not to exist and we thus thrive. At that time of my life, a hedonistic alternative to existence was strong on my mind. Girls, more girls, and the endless freedom to explore the vast world without mental barriers seemed to be an attractive lifestyle choice, yet I felt there was much more.
Later that night the three of us attended a function for staff on campus. The faces at the gathering were as varied in appearance as they were in background and origin. The diverse, wonderfully convivial group of people brought together under a sparkling Milky Way, clear as only Africa can offer, was the fortunate result of education without greed. Most of the people present were associated with either the local agricultural university or the mission hospital, both aid assisted. This turned out to be one of the few ways people of all races and backgrounds could freely mingle and share ideas in an otherwise-regimented South Africa in those days.
It attracted some of the most moral and liberal-minded academics from all over the world, partially because most were single and not in need of the bigger institutions or constrained financial entrapment leading to mortgages, family, and private schools. We all had in common a sense of adventure and a firm belief that in free and equal education lies liberation.
We existed harmoniously in isolation from the restrictive laws of apartheid. We continuously and openly shared ideas about life, science, art, politics, and whatever else came to mind. Compassion, tenderness, humility, and respect for the vulnerability of our situation under an apartheid regime drew us closer together—the potential nascency of a new South Africa created excitement in our discussions. We existed in sense.
There was Peter, a soil scientist from England; David, an agricultural scientist; and Zimbabwean, of English extraction, who had fought in the Rhodesian bush war and had lost a few marbles but still remained brilliant; Dr Masebeko, a pasture scientist from Uganda; and Anita, from Holland, who taught animal husbandry and a few other things best described as extra-curricular activities. There were also other interesting academics and support staff with equally diverse and interesting backgrounds, all setting the stage for vibrant and stimulating conversation and campus life.
All staff and students lived on campus, since the only other accommodations would have been local thatched clay huts across an imaginary ‘border’ in South Africa, a fate that would have been rather intolerable if you were black, gifted, well educated, and destined not to be submissive to highly opinionated racist white people in search of cheap labour.
Set in the displaced security of this background, inevitably the harsh reality of apartheid entered our little haven during an encounter with that failed system’s humiliating injustice and ludicrous concepts. One unfortunate night, a friend of mine (a doctor at the local hospital), his sister (a colleague at the university), and I decided to dine at a restaurant in not so faraway ‘white’ South Africa. A short car ride took us across this imaginary border to a land where reigning laws segregated people and instantly made people different.
‘The interaction between what is contained in itself and what draws something beyond itself is also what gives rise to consciousness’. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
Moral consciousness and awareness were severely lacking in individuals such as the restaurant manager on that particular night who rudely evicted us and aggressively advised us that they didn’t serve blacks. He looked at me with disgust, contempt, and simultaneous disbelief that I would dare socialise with black people. When I resisted with an argument, he punched me severely, knowing that if I dared to call the racist local police I would be in more trouble than him. Albeit an example of an extremely unenlightened person, such were the evils of apartheid and the events that shaped my (and our) future.
Most black people in South Africa during those humiliating times had to continuously deal in restraining themselves and not react against such injustice. It was higher virtue, backed by sound philosophical reasoning, that made my companions sensibly pull me back (all of us as pacifists in principle) from what would have been a rather intense confrontation and certain trouble with the law. So we continued and remained in isolation in our ‘safe-haven’ as demarcated by an imaginary border, separating sense away from apartheid’s humiliation and its fear-driven anger for the rest of our careers there.
Under the starlit Milky Way, with Aretha Franklin’s voice melodiously humming away in the background, the world seemed perfect, at least for a while, and everybody was unpretentiously happy to be alive. There was an uncanny sense of hope of pending change in the air. It would seem that Anita and I, both having high levels of androgens and white integuments in common, would after an hour or so of philosophizing about the reason for being came to a conclusion that it was to procreate, or at least practice doing so.
However, later that night I found myself involved in the most profoundly complex conversation with Lisa, who had shared in our depressing restaurant experience some nights before. Lisa was a philosophy/psychology major at a university in Johannesburg, one of the very ‘fortunate’ and gifted young black people at the time to obtain a scholarship to study at a white-dominated university. She obtained a master’s degree in philosophy and psychology, but due to a lack of job opportunities under a racist and sexist regime, she had to opt for an administrative job at the university while doing a distance education PhD. We were instantly attracted to each other on an intellectual level. She taught me sense, sense originating from a completely different cultural background yet set in a sound western education. With her lovely dark skin, high cheekbones, and shapely body, she also inevitably showed me the more primordial principles of love.
We do all at times feel like independent little boats bobbing on a vast turbulent ocean. However, all of humanity is more like the strands of a large evolving web. We are dependent on each other for emotional security and psychological wellbeing, and in that sense, yes we also belong to each other.
Chapter Six
GIVING SELFLESSLY
An earlier education in Sense
‘You are learning to love without pain; to let go without pain; to create without pain; to even cry without pain. Yes, you are even able to have your pain without pain, if you know what I mean’.
Neale Donald Walsch
I was up early the following morning. With an extra spring in my stride, I set off towards our little veterinary clinic, the only one for many miles around. It was at about that time in my life that a nagging quest concerning materialism and achievement seeded its troublesome roots in my mind. I started periodically thinking of a selfish hedonist escape to England or the USA as an alternative, away from my present utopia and away from Africa and its complexities.
Lisa was in all ways a lovely and perfect companion and was it not for my young naivety at the time and a belief that we lived in a world filled with people like her, my sojourn would have ended there and then. Was a life with expensive property in London or the Beverly Hills a worthy pursuit or was it further academic recognition I was after? Or, was this as good as it gets? I truly did not know then.
Utilitarians believe that any action intended to produce happiness and reduce suffering is the right one and any action that produces suffering or prevents happiness is wrong. The moral issue confronting us all is always knowing which actions will maximise pleasure and minimise pain for all concerned.
The first appointment of the morning approached in the distance. A boy clad in torn ragged but clean pants and shirt with an ebullient smiling black face enhancing a set of healthy white teeth came trotting along. Behind him galloped an equally vibrant brown dog.
I am still amazed how poverty, at least unaffected by alcohol or drug abuse and other forms of excessive consumerism (as seen in developing countries), will never overcome the beneficence of the human sense. The innocent appeasement and loving concern for the lives of others, combined with an easy acceptance of their lot as I witnessed in such pulchritudinous, although disadvantaged children in Africa and later in China, has always haunted me. It still saddens me whenever I see an unhappy, overfed, and depressed-looking child dressed in the latest ‘must have’ logo designer outfits in the developed world, dragged along by consuming parents who therapeutically shop for things they most likely don’t really need. The joy and content, however, showed on the young lad’s face as he enthusiastically and proudly told us all about his dog and excitedly explained the reason for his visit to us.
He presented us with two Rand, the equivalent of about fifty cents and a few days’ income for deprived families. The dampness felt on the coins indicated how he must have clenched onto them firmly for the entire five-kilometre trot form his little village to our clinic. The fee charged for vaccinations and neutering, hardly enough to cover even a pair of surgical gloves, was a justified university demand.
As I continued through my career, I occasionally came across pet owners who would coldly complain and refuse to spend any more money in catering to their pet’s medical needs and then pompously drive off in expensive cars to expensive addresses. At such times, I recall the boy’s smiling face and hope his world has, deservingly so, turned out to be a better and happier place.
The philosopher Schelling again, in Ages of the World, attempts to explain the emergence of an intelligible world simultaneously coming to terms with the mind's inextricable relation to object. There is a noble attempt from Schelling to escape Spinoza's fatalism, which renders the human freedom to do good and evil incomprehensible. Schelling's reference to the ‘veil of melancholy which is spread over the whole of nature, the deep indestructible melancholy of all life’ shows a growing concern with the duality of humankind. Schelling, although not as well known, stands out above Kant and Spinoza in his attempt to deal with human nature and a will (sense) to choose good from evil. He also valiantly attempts, as was the trend of German idealism, to reconcile mind, sense, and nature.
Essentially, Schelling, like others, tried to understand whether philosophy is able to give a rational explanation for the duality and contradictions of the manifest world. In essence, this very quest makes his arguments more just, in my opinion.
‘As that which makes the world intelligible, god relates to the ground in such a way that the
‘objective’, which takes the form of material nature, is ‘in God’ but ‘is not God in totality, i.e.
insofar as He exists; for it is only the object of His existence, it is nature in God; an essence
which is inseparable from God, but different from Him’. Schelling.
Any god would be meaningless if there were not that which he transcends: without opposition, Schelling argues, there is no life and no sense of development, which are the highest aspects of reality. This progressive approach away from his compatriots’ objective thinking seen above is to avoid the sense of a world complete in itself, which would render freedom illusory because freedom's goal would already be determined as part of the totality governed by objectivity, thus restrict reasoning and sensory freedom. Schelling starts to confront the idea whether the reconciliation of sensory freedom and objectivity that had been sought by Kant, and which was the aim of most German idealists, might be intrinsically attainable.
With Spinoza’s proposed ‘mind as an idea of the body’ and Schelling’s clear, liberated expression of a will-directed course with a mind which in turn is inseparable from god and nature, we philosophically gain more freedom in our search for sense than offered by Kant. Having sensed the Kantian objective limitations and being more aware of the subjective duality of the world, a new philosophy emerged. Goodness can clearly be seen as its liberated main-string of a sensible mind and evil its fatalistic destructive counterpart. The concept of evolutionary limitations to the human brain but at the same time its potential to justifiably question its own reasoning is more befitting of Schelling’s philosophy—and of our quest for sensory expansion. It gives us hope to sensibly reason and judge ourselves outside our own anatomical constraints.
It must be deducted that the concept of belief in god is irrelevant, since the wilful pursuit of goodness (good emotive behaviour) automatically acknowledges the noble design of the universal force and possibly all that most religions are striving for, albeit often in a very stratified state. We are more likely to achieve religious fulfilment, peace of mind, and happiness when we attend to the needs and wellbeing of others than when we single-mindedly pursue our own religion, politics, wealth, and happiness at the expense of others. Rigorous pursuit of strict religious beliefs lucidly expresses itself in creating more segregation.
The very complex issue of what is good and what is evil simply relates back to our basic evolutionary grounds of emotions. Emotions conducive to group and individual wellbeing are conducive to evolutionary success and sensory advancement, creating the basis for higher sensory expression. Emotions leading to harm and destruction of life and matter are counter to the universal force, nature and ‘god‘. If every individual applied the concept of expressing good emotive behaviour like benevolence, friendliness, kindness, thankfulness, and helpfulness every day, it would be more in line with the general universal grand design en route to advancing sense.
Religious groups, sects, and political parties (instigating segregation) are all mostly in opposition to the universal sense of togetherness. So are drug companies with cooperate takeovers leading to monopolised control on essential medicines and many other examples of greed based selfishness in a finance-driven hierarchical society not conducive to global wellbeing. The assumption by avaricious business that showing profit in competitive markets as the primary issue and their main purpose, seen then as a defunct and archaic concept. This misinterprets the true meaning of biological success and is not conducive to wellbeing of the whole. Instead, the genuine needs and feasibility to supply high quality goods and render professional services should first be established and only then provided driven by high ethical standards and guided by impartial and sensible advisory bodies and backed by their support. This, driven by pure sense, not cutthroat survivalist strategies or nepotism and trying to sell snow to Eskimos.
Such an approach will also eliminate the negative environmental impact through sales of feckless and needless or even harmful goods (some cosmetics, pesticides, supplements, homeopathic and beauty therapies are amongst these), merely selling because of false advertising campaigns. The new emphasis then on supplying high quality, valued goods to the people. If, as an example, we now take a food producer in this new market environment with the emphasis and core values of the company vigorously focused on authentic health aspects, quality and freshness of the food and products, these values then will echo throughout all levels of the production process and society. With such humanistic repute, concern and care for the health of others going home with staff creating a snowball effect of trust and wellness in the community.
Besides being sensible, this approach is also profitable as shown by recent studies at Harvard business school and substantiated recently by companies like Boeing, ICI and many others. Boeing after near disaster and closure went through a phase directed by principle goals of pleasing shareholders and showing good investment return, media making us well aware of the outcome- they lost to Airbus. Simply, by changing their strategy and once again taking civil aviation (the reason they are there) to heart they came up with the 777 Dreamliner and now since 2008 again can claim a leading position in commercial aviation.
Darwinists have planted the root that wars and other processes that have given vent to bad emotive behaviour will lead to survival of the fittest by reinforcing dominance, nature’s way, ‘a bit of cleaning up the old gene pool‘. Some staunch Darwinists, with no sense of rue, suggest that famine will select the weak from the strong and as such should be seen a natural selection process, inclined to restore the global carrying capacity. Acknowledgement of such heedless spuriousness is in part responsible for our gullible tolerance regarding the ongoing torment we witness around us.
Possibly one of the most ridiculous things I ever read related to these matters was in the Daily Mirror of 17 October 2006 whilst in flight from London to Tokyo. The sensation seeking newspaper article read something to the effect of Homo sapiens evolving into two distinct new sub-species based on present day ‘class’ structure. One was a small, stocky, hairy, plump, and ugly form, (I’m not kidding, they actually used the word ugly). The other, a tall, lean, and intelligent individual that will be the ruling class. The plausible article claimed to have quoted a prominent evolutionary biologist. At first, I was rather pleased with myself that I was lean and tall and generally considered to be intelligent, but soon realised the absolute ridiculousness of the situation.
Such hype has subtly been implanted in human thinking and sets the basis for the idea of survival of the strong and the narcissistic approach seen in the search for ‘riches’ in a society driven to excel at all costs. This then would better the chances of reproductive success, self-gratification, genetic and DNA survival, and continuing diversification—or so we think in our confused state, not knowing where we are going and why.
Keep in mind that colonialism, Nazism, apartheid, and such were all extreme attempts at such domineering strategies utilising similar brouhaha to promote their ideas. So then follows also the complacency about the poor and starving masses seen in some political arenas and financially driven groups today. Aggressive corporate takeovers, white-collar crime, school bullies, invasion of countries, terrorism, greed, burglary, nepotism, murder, and aggressive behaviour all have their primitive roots in bad emotive behaviour, without intelligent cerebral control. Should we condone this as natural selection at play with nothing more than whimsical attempts at law-enforcement to regulate such actions?
Absurd profanities aside, without accepting the benevolence of a patterned sense we enter an ongoing debate as to who has the right to be the aggressor and whom not, who has the right to make nuclear weapons and who not, or as under the apartheid system at the time, who can use a particular toilet and which skin colour cannot.
As we have seen, such survivalist Darwinian extremist reasoning is nothing more than intellectual minimalism (petty mindedness, as Confucius states in his analects). Such stratification inducing thinking is, however, not surprising as a transition after years of idealising about ourselves as completely separate from the animals and upon re-discovering ourselves as ‘intellectually’ dominant apes.
After placement of the last suture in the dog’s abdomen and on completion of sterilising her, the phone’s ringing unpleasantly interrupted my drifting thoughts. In this part of the world, where most activity ceases for a while around lunchtime, it could only mean it was urgent. It was a sweltering hot day and the phone call beckoned us to a cow with dystocia (difficult birth), an emergency that didn’t allow us the luxury of lunch. Such a phone call also had the portentous herdsman in those days bicycling for more than an hour to the local general store where the only phone for miles around was located, serving as a lifeline for emergencies. He had to then frantically cycle back in the blazing heat to be at the herd when Ernest and I arrived.
To us it involved an hour-long drive in our air-conditioned van, mild by comparison. Most of our destinations involved driving on paths like these, non-existent to the unfamiliar eye. It always amazed me how Ernest found his way, when to my own eyes it appeared as if some mad botanist with a fetish for order had gone and cloned an acacia tree and then, in regularly measured intervals, had placed it in all directions for as far as the eye could see. Just as I started wondering which of Africa’s predators would be first to arrive at the scene with two lost dehydrated individuals stranded next to an energy deficient vehicle, a small village, in all its simplistic charm, emerged in front of us.
What appeared in numbers to be all of the village’s inhabitants were gathered around a relative small frail looking cow in a primitive but functional wooden crush. The bewildered cow was still standing, a vaguely promising sign. As I donned an arm-length plastic glove and poured liberal amounts of lubricant over it, I reflected on the fact that all we had at our disposal were my small medical bag, our pre-sterilised pack of instruments, two buckets of what appeared to be clean water, and an upside-down tin drum to serve as an instrument trolley. With the large, intense yellow African sun blazing mercilessly overhead, I bravely submerged my gloved arm full-length into the cow’s uterus, hoping that she didn’t consider it a good time to surrender to effort and pain and collapse.
The calf was still alive and I could feel the lips applying the instinctive nature-given suck reflex to my finger. Getting the head into the pelvic canal proved to be a process on par with finding parking for a ten-tonne fuel delivery truck on the Champs Elyse on Bastille Day. Dismayed, I withdrew my muculent arm from the uterus and turned to the discomposed sweaty faced herdsman behind me.
The value and importance of cattle to native Africans in these parts originate from a mixture of status value intertwined with guileless ancestral love for the animals. It is also an essential food source where only the weak and old will be culled for basic needs, and then with ceremonial dignity. Cattle are to them a way of life. So what I had to tell the expectant young herdsman was on par with telling a newly mortgaged young couple that I was about to take a sledge hammer to try and locate a faulty electrical wire in their new home.
Ernest explained in detail the surgical procedure and risks involved with a caesarean section under these conditions and the other unacceptable alternative of performing an embryotomy. An embryotomy involves cutting the newborn calf into pieces small enough to extract it from the uterus, a gruesome technique best left to young Gestapo officers in training.
Therefore, with the treatment choice the easier part and two very worried looking tribesman to assist in supporting the cow’s head, Ernest and I set about to prepare the rotund and silently moving lower abdominal and flank region for the caesarean section. Ernest had already started to shave the area with a handheld ‘Minora’ shaving-blade and soapy water, a technique driven by need and the lack of readily available electricity in these parts. With my own head spinning with drug dosages and anatomical incision sites, I apprehensively set about injecting an analgesic-sedative drug into the jugular vein, which, combined with a regional local-anaesthetic (line-block), were the only agents at our insular disposal to comfort our distressed mother. The precarious challenge was in part to keep the cow standing during the entire caesarean. If she did collapse, the wound will get contaminated with soil and faeces, resulting inevitably in post-surgical complications (peritonitis) and a slow death under prevailing conditions.
An eerie silence fell over the vast plains, except for an occasional distressed-sounding moo from the cow whose eyes now appeared fixed on some spot in the distance as I lifted the glistening scalpel. The skin parted ominously as the scalpel blade moved silently across it. Bright red blood welling in the newly created skin divide was the only colour in this rather bleak situation under the conformity of the midday African sun, as I unassumingly and bluntly dissected into the fascia towards the abdominal muscles. They split with alarming ease to reveal the gravid uterine horn, bulging with life! The miracle of anticipating new life, regardless of species or conditions, is enough to create an inexplicable and euphoric adrenalin rush. What follows as a surgeon is usually instinctive and effortless, with no need to recall exact textbook detail. Unaffected by objective financial concerns, the motive and my actions make pure sense.
I laboriously went about my task and finished placing the last layer of subcutaneous sutures, followed by skin closure, with a blissful feeling of content. Behind me, beaming faces observed Ernest zestfully rubbing the slimy bundle with a clean towel and assisting it onto its unsteady slender legs. I knew this was life filled with sense!
At inspirational times like these and with the mind in an eclectic state, destiny can be determined. At that point in my career I realised I wasn’t cut out for farm animal practice, philosophically or scientifically. I simply could not (and cannot) convince myself that meat is a moral source of protein for us omnivorous humans. Trying to make sense of major advances in surgery and medicine employed to save an animal, only to go home and sit down and dispassionately eat it, seems contradictory and perplexing; even to utilitarians with some sense. The other alternative was to pursue farm animal practice from a preventative healthcare and herd health perspective, production driven. This was consumerist and economically biased and contrary to my (our should-be) moral ideologies.
Applying acquired surgical skills and medical knowledge to improve lives of all sentient beings was more befitting of my childhood dream and it set the stage to make more sense in finding out what made this fragile, enigmatic life wholesome and sustainable. Ever since being taught about Watson, Crick, and their famed unravelling of the DNA molecule as a scholar, I couldn’t resist contemplating all of life as one unfolding coexisting force, not in competition under cruel Darwinian rules, but with DNA merely as means of feeding an emerging benevolent ‘sense’. If the only purpose of life was DNA spreading and genetic selection, then surely the purpose of life is narrow-visioned. More meaningful would seem to be a goal-driven progression of sensory advancement with DNA serving merely as a means to an end—to give birth to sense. The birth of a calf, a few moments later esoterically sensing its mother’s teat, is surely much more meaningful than the ‘senseless’ seeding of DNA.
Thinking in a Kantian sense, we are restricted by our evolutionary attachments to our immediate environment in terms of objective beginnings and ends. We apply this to our utilitarian driven objective science, dimming its true potential while we eat the animals (which are compatriots of our existence in sense) we so officiously study.
As offspring of the Big Bang, is this wise and where are we heading? With substance and support granted to the Big Bang theory in 1965 by the observation of existence of microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson from the Bell Telephone Laboratories and this possibly just one of many energy forces that are omnipresent and bypass us daily, why ignore this expanding sense? The infrared and radio waves reaching our observatories today reflect the primitive origins of the universe billions of years ago. Arguably, we cannot vaguely imagine what our senses, or its offspring technology, have not yet evolved into perceiving and discovered. The little pristine calf, now standing and clumsily suckling at the mother’s teats, the jubilant faces around me—we were all mere seedlings of that.
If sense guides us, the call by environmentalist to eat less meat should surely be much more than an objective conservationist’s goal of achieving targets to please a ‘safe operational space’. Our duty more urgently lies also not in ruining incomes dependent on this industry, but in guiding sense to other alternatives. Besides all the healthy vegetarians I know, our immediate duty is not to enter a debate on protein sources and nutrition only, but to care for the mental health and wellbeing of existing sentient beings. This we cannot delay for one moment, since care for mind and sense sets the basis for all our other actions.
We thrive in sense.
On our return to the university clinic, the boy, still jubilant and smiling, was patiently waiting for us to discharge his dog. In addition, waiting was an old man with a serene open face and a depressed-looking dog lying next to him. While Ernest discharged the young boy’s dog, I studied the weather-lined face belonging to the old man.
The benevolent eyes, placed in small slits formed by hours staring into the sun, and the high, heavily furrowed forehead showed the effects of years of solitary hours watching and herding the cattle in his care. The only companion to share these endless days with him was a medium-sized dog of nondescript breed. Obediently lying next to him, his companion was breathing laboriously and deeply, unaccounted for by the lateness of the afternoon and easing of the midday heat.
The old man and I concernedly lifted and placed the lethargic dog on the examination table. Absorbed in the pathos of it all, I began to examine it methodically as dictated by my training. The gums were extremely pale and the pulse racing, combined with a fever of forty degrees Celsius—all symptoms of a dreadful disease called Babesiosis, or the misnomer ‘tick fever‘.
Ticks are numerous in that part of Africa and interestingly only two species of ticks harbour this disease-causing little protozoon. To confirm the diagnosis of Babesiosis, a small drop of blood, usually obtained from the margin of an ear, is examined under a microscope. Small signet or teardrop-shaped organisms seen inside the red blood cells confirm a diagnosis.
Why did these tiny little organisms exist in the particular tick that infected this specific dog? Is it all part of a natural selection process to sift the strong from the weak and diversify the gene pool? The tiny malicious red blood cell-lysing organism had the ability to destroy this complex organism on the table within three to five days unless we interfered. Do we conclude it was one of the ‘unfit’ with no further need to survive, natural selection at play and leave it at that? As Ernest warmed the donor blood, I pondered with no levity but total amazement on this devious thing we call disease and its purpose, if any.
The little bundle on the table in front of me, with the lifesaving blood now flowing into its veins, suddenly appeared not only all alone, but meaningless in this timeless and infinite universe. My own presence and attempt to save its life was equally purposeless in a Darwinian scheme of things. It would appear that all of us were. Such reasoning, I pondered, means deductively that the universe is then objectively equally purposeless from our perspective. My acquired knowledge to choose and administer the appropriate drug intravenously in order to kill the malicious little creatures (who in their own right also struggle to survive) was then only of some objective benefit to the poor old man (who couldn’t have afforded it if not for our charity clinic). From the dog’s point, with its phylogenetic status inferior to ours, our efforts would be unrecognised and as such equally insignificant.
Yet this pitiable little bundle was one of a kind, possibly (‘possibly’, allowing for the possibility of a multiverse system with the duplication theory, where there may be a replica or replicas of everything happening here, why not?) the only one with such a unique genetic code to have existed or ever would in the entire vast universe. This sorrowful little DNA-containing package in front of me took eons of exact evolutionary placements to arrive in its exclusive present form and to follow its extraordinary path through space and time to be bitten by an equally unique tick, transmitting an equally unique disease-causing organism.
The intention of this primal little protozoon wasn’t to kill or maim, but purely to exist and survive, mystically as important in presence and being and as perplexing an organism as George Bush, Marley in Sydney, or you and me. Another principle of life came to mind. No creature or person shall be looked down upon or elevated above another; we are all equal in the universal context of things. After all, a viral epidemic (singular DNA containing capsule) can wipe out large population groups if we fail to confront it in Sense.
Evil individuals impact on life, such as Adolf Hitler, on this planet may have been more destructive than most, but as an individual he was as meaningless (or meaningful depending on one’s interpretation of this) as the disease-causing tick or a viral epidemic. He was simply an accumulation and outlet of negative and deplorable energy. Small destructive forces operate all the time, but at times, they culminate in events that have a large and tragic impact on the whole, like September 11. However, the good will always eventually predominate as patterned by ultimately unique sense. Negative and destructive events are just natural reminders of our primitive sensory origins and unnecessary delays. Without sense, a viral epidemic can wipe us all out (or used in warfare); in sense, we can together prevent and control it and learn from its diminutive presence.
In an austere Darwinian world, why bother with the diseased and weak? Should we not help nature speed up the selection process, stop the revivifying blood flowing into the vein, and withhold the medicine? Should we not stop the pathetic attempts at world aid in poverty-stricken countries altogether? Should we not breed the ‘Spartan super-race’, eliminate all miserable and inferior creatures, take over, and rule poor countries (again)? Alternatively, do we merely keep ‘them’ going for gene diversification purposes an our own selfish potential benefit? In the late 1980s, the survival of the fittest idea, with human life as a mere off chance mutative event, was strongly imprinted in zoological, biological, and scientific thinking. All the above I could later in life (and more clear-minded) not only query, but convincingly reject. Not only by means of the above argument, but also by means of a simple life spent in sense, as a witness in and all around me. Any ‘supreme’ beings still pondering on this wondrous life in sense as witnessed around us as a mere freak event, before considering support for eugenics or the Termination Machine, why not give sense a chance. It certainly seems like a better lifestyle choice, even to the utilitarians and health conscious amongst us.
I realised from the invigorating pink colour returning to the dog’s gums that what I was doing (and what everybody and everything else does in order to assist everything or everybody else) was to move emphatically forward into time and sensory advancement. It’s not only an ennobling and inescapable must, but also our reason for being- the Sensible Gene. We must continue to quell the negative and evil egoistic emotions and push to develop and nurture the good and constructive emotions and deeds reverently and persistently. We can learn from even a small malicious-appearing little protozoan or virus. Never let greed or any other negative emotion affect our noble endeavours. Instead, let us be sensibly driven to learn and take care of even the smallest creatures and people around us on an en masse global level. Idealistic? Maybe, but so were landing on the moon, the first heart transplant, genetic modification, and cloning at one time.
The dog struggling for survival on the table and the ‘greedy’ little organisms the medicine was now effectively killing were not only unique but had reason to be there and to exist, gracefully so. Our sense and foundations rest on this organism as much as anything else. Greed and fear made the little primitive ‘sensory’ puerile organism consume more than its share, unintentionally so. Our sensory evolutionary advancement gave us the deific status of understanding and restoring the balance by controlling the ‘greedy’ little parasite. It was ennobling because it was in line with the divine order and sense.
The purpose of disease-causing organisms isn’t cruelty. They never have the intention to kill or harm, merely to exist. Entrapped, primitive, and ‘confused’ in a non-advanced evolutionary sensory state, however, they cannot yet sense how their existence can affect and destroy (somewhat like some unenlightened people we encounter in daily life). For this, they depend on us in our state of higher sense. This trend, if seen in our own species, at times adorned in expensive business suits and driving fancy cars on their way to parliament or large banks is tragic indeed. Making selfish decisions (not in terms of what is best for the whole) negatively affects the progression of the life force. Yet it has an equally important place in our future sensory evolution, as much as the atoms of air we breathe. No one or anything is above anything else when stripped bare in front of the divine order. We all just are; we exist in sense, some of us just tend to ignore it as an insignificant off-chance event or connive with it as a cruelly calculative objective affair.
Every design pattern in nature and science as we have seen, indicates a struggle toward achieving perception—perception not as a means to survival, unless seen objectively, but perception as a goal-directed course. Even cells in our now-recovering patient’s body had gained from the experience. It ’sensed’ the presence of the organism by means of specialised cells we refer to as an immune system. By means of a complex set of immune-mediated mechanisms, it now had an imprinted ability not to only instantly identify the organism, but also to launch a defence in the future that could potentially pass information to its progeny. An immune system is in essence a sixth sense with a memory, following the same sense-seeking pattern with nothing but good intent for the protection of the whole albeit on a much smaller scale.
Unlike the nervous system, consisting of neurons and axons with their dendrite links and its dependence on neurotransmitters, the immune system relies on the blood cells, circulation, lymphatics, and local cellular chemical mediators to perceive its world. There is no need or any intent to give a detailed lecture on complex immunology but suffice it, for our purposes, to use the aforementioned blood parasite as an example of this ‘memory and sense’ in our immune system following the same ordered pattern in search of sense.
If we were to inject a dead, attenuated, and avirulent form of the protozoon organism (antigen), aseptically prepared in a solution (normally with an adjuvant to enhance its antigenicity) into a patient, the antigen would uniquely stimulate the immune system. This stimulation triggers circulating lymphocytes to produce antigen-specific antibodies. These antibodies (proteins) imprinted with an identification code would be primed to (if ever the organisms were encountered again) rapidly multiply and launch a very specific attack. Such a form of memory and cognitive ability of the immune system seen, not as aggressive or antagonistic, but as continuity in the amazing harmony and coexistence of sense. These checks and balances are constantly at play to protect the body’s cells against an autoimmune attack- where the immune system targets its own cells. Perceived in such rare events of self-harm on cellular level is a similar pattern as seen in the darker slumps of humankind’s sensibility. An example of this would be a disease like lupus (an autoimmune disease), where the immune system can start targeting innate blood, skin, or other cells. At times, balancing mechanisms do go wrong and can cause such autoimmune diseases; meteorites do hit the earth and Hitlers are born. However, what stands out on all levels of existence is the prodigious ability of maintaining homeostasis and balance and not attack and harm itself—the harmony in sense.
The immune system is certainly much more complex than the above description and consists of many other cells and proteins. Its intrinsic actions aside, the patterned uniqueness of its ability to subserviently measure and assess its limited little world and use ‘memory and sense’ to the benefit of the whole (even in the absence of a conventional ‘sensory’ system) with such decree is what we should reflect on and respect.
Regardless of subjectification by immunologists (invaluable in our search for improved cures and quality of life), the underlying ability to function in such decree is the beneficence that intrigues us most here. Considering, on a biochemical level, all the steps that could create errors in such a system to respond correctly, sense is yet again serenely at work. The dog was now starting to rotate its head, trying to assess the world around it again.
Interestingly, an emerging technique used in medicine today is to utilise the immune system to attack cancer cells based on its ability to attack its own cells. With emerging knowledge on a molecular and biochemical level and sense on our side, who knows what the future may hold if we can prime, target, and switch this system on-and-off. We could possibly inject some compound to trigger a prime response to an individualised and finely tuned attack on diseased tissue. Surgery, replaced by a simple injection. More amazingly, another injected few stem cells would repair the destroyed tissue. This is not daydreaming, but real science with a strong conditional probability. So let us flow in sense.
Science and economics can become obsessed with not only, as previously discussed, statistics but also probability factors of occurrences eventuating. The attempted benefit lies in predicting markets, disease outbreaks, and much more. As an example, it may be utilised to predict the odds of a patient surviving with the current treatments at our disposal, before a new cure is developed, or a comet hitting the earth. With probability overwhelmingly subjective to the objective, it has (not unexpectedly) a formidable position in science, as exemplified by the conditional probability theorem of Bayes’ law. Applied in philosophy and science, based on objective values it is Kantian in its construction. Used here as an example to prove its limitations and our entrapment in restrictive Kantian reasoning, it is important because we simply cannot set our future hopes on probability theorems. We have to also be guided by an unfolding sense.
Assume Bayes’ rule could be accurately employed to predict the probability of the much-debated avian flu affecting the world population or markets collapsing in view of our recordings of these matters so far (how wrong were we?). As an example.
Predicting a pan-epidemic based on available knowledge using Bayes’ theorem it, equates as follows:
P(A│B)=P(B├|A))P(A)/P(B)
P(A) is the prior probability or marginal probability of A. It is "prior" in the sense that it does not take into account any information about B.
P(A|B) is the conditional probability of A, given B. It is also called the posterior probability because it is derived from or depends upon the specified value of B.
P(B|A) is the conditional probability of B given A. It is also called the ‘likelihood’.
P(B) is the prior or marginal probability of B, and acts as a normalizing constant.
Bayes' theorem in this form gives a mathematical representation of how the conditional probability of event A given B is related to the converse conditional probability of B given A.
Forget about reading it twice if bowled over on the first attempt, since it’s not too vital for our purposes here to understand it fully. What is important (and the problem with Bayes’ theory) is that each event, occurring at a different time and place in space, is in turn completely governed by a new set of circumstances and subject to an infinite set of variable and changing probability factors, each perhaps in turn subject to Bayes’ rules of probability again. The fact that events A and B have occurred will, at the time of using their factual occurrences as a reference base, have moved through time and space (remember baby Troy) and be subject to an entirely new set of variable objective probability interpretations subject to human emotive behaviour and our awareness in sense. Still, Bayes’ law is often utilised in science and economics. If it has been proved to have some statistically significance-well let’s not get back onto that.
Highly unlikely would be the September 11 events, unless one is aware of the evil anger factor existing amongst some individuals (out of step with the group order) and managed to predict such variable factors for global evil at different stages of our evolution—a rather perplexing, if not impossible, task. On the other hand, existing in sense with global interconnectivity and a calm sensibility as a constant guide (reinforced by less malicious media, political systems, and educational systems in a just economic environment free from manipulation), September 11 would certainly not have happened and probability laws would be more meaningful.
A question Kant posed (and claimed had never been posed before) was whether there are synthetic judgments a priori. That is, whether, independent of experience, we can conjure the thought which unites the subject and what it stands for in judgments when the ‘what it stands for’ is not contained in the subject.
The probability factors and possibilities in affirmation of anything would be impossible if it wasn’t for some orderly sense initiating the subject’s existence in the first instance (a senseless subject). So, yes, we can predicate opinions not contained in subject and make synthetic a priori judgements, but only with a sense of the sense in the subject on our side.
Our course to abundance and wellness is patterned and set. Therefore, the probability of a cure for cancer, global harmony and for managing pending viral outbreaks are likely outcomes, following natural laws and trends of interconnectivity and sensory progress. This is due to an effort directed towards a sense of understanding principles of the universal law, in contrast to complete submission to Darwinist objective proclamations and financial restraints. We need to concentrate on development of goal directed sense. Sadly, the struggle and delays would be enormous without global commitment to group togetherness and respect for the essence of life in all its forms.
Kant states explicitly that all judgments of necessity are a priori, but not that all a priori judgments are judgments of necessity (a view he nonetheless held). A judgment of necessity is one which cannot possibly be false, while a judgment made a priori is one which is not based on experience. This unnecessary and aimless confusion expresses the state of intellectual fear of not having a solid reference base for sense (which we never will have, unless we return to nothing—where we started) without a backdrop of conflict seeded by deductive and objective reasoning of the struggling Darwinian mind.
However, the inherent divine order and its goal-directed sensory evolution have, more than any objective calculation, guaranteed the probability of a positive way forward…if we follow. In our understanding of this principle, we can speed things up enormously. Likewise, as stated, any deviant emotional negativity would markedly increase disaster-event probability odds, like a brain tumour affecting the senses. Instead of calculating probability factors based on fear driven objective facts, a more worthy cause to pursue would be to concentrate on obtaining suitable conditions—interconnectivity, truthful honesty, and commitment to develop all aspects of benevolent life to the benefit of the whole, sharing ideas and positive emotive behaviour. This would include abolishing greed and poverty, sharing resources, and placing more emphasis on mental health and education in letting sense happen globally. With such a backdrop who would have to worry about a next market crash?
This would enhance the odds of a successful outcome from a group perspective, if not assure it. Now, with our destiny inevitably trapped in a progressive evolutionary drive for sensory advancement and probability based on harmony, group wellbeing, and understanding of a goal-directed sense, we are true participants of the universal drive. In the end, there are no competitions, wars, or other survivalist strategies needed, only a true understanding of how things work and where we are going, based on our interdependency and cooperation in sense. We can then address global warming and dwindling natural resources without greed or selfish nepotistic involvement—as a whole with a sensible gene, diversifying with purpose and meaning.
It was revivifying at the end of a long day to see a tail wag from the dog in front of me. The dog was still in a cot-like bed where we kept our intensive care patients, but with a head fully erect now. I could have sworn it smiled at me as I lifted my eyes from the microscope in a state of semi-late afternoon slumber. Life was great! The late afternoon sun was throwing shadows on the distant wall. The bottles of medicine, stethoscopes, and an assortment of instruments scattered around between open textbooks and half-drunk cups of coffee all became meaningful. They contained sagacity. Although lifeless, their atoms existed in harmony with what we were doing in a noble profession on a planet destined for sensory utopia.
Days can become cyclic if viewed objectively. As an example, objective to a pay cheque only, work can be mundane and done only in order to please the essential needs of the employer. To the idle rich, life is depressingly meaningless and futile amidst a system that works well enough by keeping the ‘masses’ happy, provided they don’t think too much and have access to limited amounts of alcoholic beverages and mind-altering drugs. In contrast, if one repairs a malfunctioning car, plants a crop, or sweeps a floor in a group sense context, it becomes more meaningful and less status oriented. The reward lies in creating harmony and togetherness for the whole.
The microchip inserted into a computer by a factory worker then isn’t a less important job. It’s meaningful in helping manufacture a computer that will aid his child and others to write books to help the world or to send spaceships to future galaxies. This factory worker is as important as anybody else in sending the first manned spaceship to Mars. Happy people instinctively have this approach to life and likewise have more fulfilled, complete lives, expressing respect for and assisting others-this I have witnessed all over the world.
There is no reward in self-gratification or greed and there will never be satisfaction gained on any more than a preliminary short-term basis by greed and other counterproductive emotions. Sense is harmony, togetherness, coexistence, and sensory development, nobly driven to develop all aspects promoting group wellbeing. This includes the deific ability to relieve pain and mental suffering of all sentient beings. If we think of the good and positive and assist each other through illness and pain into a better tomorrow, is utopia or nirvana not guaranteed?
In conclusion of this chapter (for no reason other than its aesthetic beauty), an extract from a dialog between Charles and Sebastian, two central characters from Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh.
‘I suppose they try and make you believe and awful lot of nonsense?
Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sounds terribly sensible to me.....
But you can’t believe in things because they are a lovely idea.
But I do. That is how I believe.’
‘
Chapter Seven
HAPPINESS
‘I don’t know why, but I am really so unhappy’. Heinrich Heine.
Early African sunrises are as invigorating and refreshing as newborn life itself. Our little clinic became quite a feature in this little remote corner of the world and with time, most mornings at least a few people would already be waiting when I reached the clinic. An urgent case would always be attended to first, with helpful acceptance from other waiting patients and their owners.
The thin-boned collie cross on the examination table was laterally recumbent and breathing heavily. Its unpleasant state of misery and pain was due to an unfortunate fall from the back of a truck and it was ‘lucky’ to be alive. A blood-rimmed open fracture of the femur revealed an awkwardly shattered bone fragment eerily protruding though the skin. Laboured breathing suggested intra-thoracic injuries that required x-rays.
Relieving pain (mental and physical) in any creature is indeed a high-minded act and takes its honorary position as one of the most sophisticated emotive expressions known to contemporary humans.
Pain perception in dogs is now general acknowledged to be in most ways similar to pain perception in humans (how long did it take us in hampered sense!). Pain symptoms in dogs like infants, however, are again difficult to objectively assess. In theory, symptoms of pain, such as panting, vocalisation, anxiety, trembling, and aggressively protecting a localised spot are eagerly explored in veterinary texts with the hope of better objective recordings. Physiologically, increased blood cortisone levels can be used as a measure during the stress induced by pain, but in most cases it can simply be ’sensed’ by merely witnessing the patient. We also now know that the psychological and cerebral impact of pain exist in animals, as they do in humans, with midbrain and limbic mediation. Dogs with a tendency to depression or anxiety (the Chihuahua comes to mind) tend to be less pain tolerant, the same as in less stoic humans.
Schelling contends that the identity of thought and being cannot be articulated within thought, for either the concept would have to go first, and being would have to be the consequence of the concept, which would mean it was no longer absolute being, or the concept is the consequence of being; then we must begin with being without the concept.
Pain, seen in the context of either being or thought, places us in Schelling’s dilemma. In our pet animals and human infant patients, there is not much scope for the thought concept, only the experience of being in pain, and thus the callousness of its nastiness in animals and children. Neither can we allocated the privilege of receiving relief from such suffering based on worth and deny it to all sentient beings__ under the same principles as our initial discussion on the Kantian approach in ending a life. Pain is a feeling and as such in most cases, a state of being that can only be expressed if its victim can communicate such a horrible state of existence meaningfully to others. Alternatively, it relies on others to sense their emotions related to such misery in their cries for help.
With a catheter in place, the drip flowed freely into the vein. The morphine (donated by the mission hospital close by) injected simultaneously seemed inconsequential, but it was the best analgesic on offer under the circumstances. We had to wait for the patient’s condition to stabilise before taking X-rays in anticipation of a general anaesthetic and surgery.
Considering the fact that my measly attempt at relieving pain in this little animal was horrifically overpowered, not only in context of drugs available to us, but also in the scope of the ongoing pain inflicted on millions of other sentient beings in such places as feedlots and abattoirs we tend to overlook. These slaughterhouses and feedlots create an insensible approach to life, for no better reason than to satisfy our avidity in culinary taste. The inconceivable mental and physical pain resulting from such an objective Darwinian approach is persistently overlooked and camouflaged by the antipathy of commercial profit.
Scenes inside feedlots and abattoirs are routinely so gruesome that sensitive veterinary students can today be exempted from watching the atrocities that go on inside them if they so request. As veterinary students, we had the misfortune to witness this mass murder (with no option in the ‘80s) as part of a course in public health, certainly not primary healthcare from a soon-to-be slaughtered sheep or pig’s perspective. The horrific squeals and bleats that ensued from the crushes at the entrance of such slaughterhouses and the complacency of the abattoir workers when the ‘job’ was done are truly disturbing. This barbarism is a reflection of the entrapment in fear with blinkered vision, still a dominant feature of the human condition, strongly anchored in its Darwinist roots.
For the most part, however, we are willing accomplices in our own ignorance as we go about turning our backs on acts such as these. We then stupidly settle back in our little niche within an unequal and stratified global society to our dinners of ‘premium quality’ pieces of steak. From hunter gatherer to ‘intellectual, conniving, clever apes’ it may seem ‘smart’ to us in a Darwinian frame of mind to see what we’re doing in terms of breeding and slaughtering animals for the economic and food benefits. The original motive may have been pure and to the benefit of group survival, but as always it fell victim to our antiquated profit-seeking fiscal system, with its cruel Darwinian rules. In years to come, based on the divine force and its drive towards progressive sensory development, it is inevitable that our cruelty will be gasped at in horror museums. Alternatively, we will pay for our deeds, as already seen with the effect of cattle farming on the environment.
Pain has its evolutionary origins not as a form of punishment, as may be seen under the influence of religion, or as Darwinists would see it, as an opportunity for the ’fit’ to hotfoot in to finish off the wounded. Pain, with its roots in sense, protects us. It takes weight off the sore limb in order to heal, but above all, it calls on the quintessence of group togetherness for support and care. One can only imagine the horrendous images and sense of dreadful fear in animal minds as they line up in front of the abattoir, hearing the squeals and smelling the blood of their fellow beings.
The pathos of it all hit me as I increased the morphine dose, realising in disdain that the anger seen in irritable and ignorant humans in daily life selfishly absorbed in their moneymaking efforts is also nothing more than an inescapable link to our primitive, unenlightened Darwinian mind.
The surgery was demanding. I had to make do with a narrow selection of orthopaedic stainless steel pins (Steinman pins) and surgical wire. The bits and pieces eventually came together and after cleaning and suturing the soft- tissue, it was with great relief that I palpated a well-reduced and secure forearm. As I went about suturing the skin, an image from a few years earlier appeared in my mind. During a post-exam ‘stress-relief’ trip to Turkey, the cheerless and grim back streets of Izmir vividly came to memory. Dozens of emaciated cats appeared from nowhere in the glum alleyways like in a nightmare, many with misaligned fractures of various bones. The sad lassitude and painful appearance of those creatures’ faces was incredibly disturbing; they proved that medical advances are noble indeed and essential in our quest for higher sensory advancement. With an enlightened new understanding of their dismal experiences, I became more purpose driven than ever before in my quest.
Contemporary humankind’s neglect in caring for other sentient beings and each other is a major evolutionary obstacle. It stands in the way of advancing our sensory evolution and is counter to the divine drive of sense. Caring about the plight of the non-human victims of our actions is not a case of sentimental puppy hugging or of childlike anthropomorphism. It shows respect in creating togetherness and breaking links to our brutal Darwinian past. The cold awakening to the wrongs of our present actions will be a revelation as enlightening as the discovery our animal origins, and reflected on as being as barbaric as public beheadings.
The post-surgery X-ray showed a good reduction of the fractured femur and proper pin and wire placement created a successful outcome. The similarity of interspecies anatomy is well known. In fact, very few anatomical differences besides size and slight variation in implantation and origin sites of muscles exist between man’s best friend and our own anatomy. It is merely in an objectively larger prefrontal cortex that manifests our responsible and elevated position as humans.
It is in then also this breach of honour to lead morally that lays our shameful disgrace. It is like a body dependent on a psychopathic or sadistic mind. From the most simplistic unicellular organism to the most intelligent being, we all stand naked and completely submissive to the ubiquitous universal force with its resolute path toward improved deployment of sensory advancement.
The dignified ease with which most animals accept this life force, with all its complexities, is fascinating. The cast was set and the anaesthetic started to wear off, the sleepy face with its ears humbly set back indicating no sign of aggression, fear, or any negative emotion, only gratitude and friendly acceptance of life. Ernest and I stood in quiet isolation as we witnessed this miracle of revivification. Our actions could again, in a strict Darwinian sense, appear insignificant. We gave a middle-aged dog with a rather ‘meaningless’ existence an improved quality of life after an accident and the chance to face at least another relatively pain free day on the harsh plains of Africa. As modest salaried workers and with little grandeur or praise for our actions from colleagues, our rewards lay elsewhere and we acknowledged this fact as we both stood in silent respect of this sense we operate in—above all.
At the time, the significance of such actions without material reward didn’t appear as meaningful as later in my life. Upon confronting the financially-driven developed world with its objective values in my advancing career, the merits of such actions clearly stood out. In a contrasting world, a similar procedure would demand a fee well in excess of a thousand dollars and professional opinions persistently queried and measured against one another in an aggressive ‘sue-fear’ environment. In these cultures, with everything taken for granted and obtainable (as long as you pay for it) everything is done in order to get some form of self-centred remuneration in return. With this punishment-and-reward approach entrenched in us, we create distrust with no sense in it.
In our primitive past the worshipping of higher-order gods have made us sentient beings. The discovery of our animal ancestry and evolutionary origins has turned us into distrustful, cruel victims of this revelation. Instead of displaying threatening fangs to express dominance, we can now claim to have, with some evolutionary ‘sophistication’, replaced such fear-inducing dentures with money to threaten and control. We buy people’s ‘souls’ and once in our ‘money created little comfort zones’, falsely believe we are free from our fear-driven anxiety or any further responsibility. In our desperate and blinkered chase for financial dominance and control, the consequences and hapless victims created along the way of this fear-driven, senseless rush are cruelly and thoughtlessly left behind.
Surrendering the money-only motif (materialistic monism) as a driving force in a post-Darwinist society in exchange for a new goal-directed, less stratified, and more deific existence would be much more conducive to the evolutionary re-encephalisation of our new stage of sensory development. Anything less than this move away from our primitive past would be sensory and emotional suicide. In our capacity as ‘higher’ caretakers of sense, we are responsible to administer this new awareness and the urgent need for change, with its benefits progressing ‘down’ the phylogenetic tree, eventually to every non-human metazoan as well. The ultimate aim would be for all of the disparate modes of ‘sensory’ life to share the selfless essence of being, at the very least, generically non-suffering. Achieving this, another sleepwalking phase, with shameful cruelty in our history of the world, will have drawn to a grateful close, paving the way to explore unbelievable sensory wellness in a new propitious era of togetherness in this emerging sense.
In essence, this is not entirely a novel concept, but as we have seen, an omnipresent patterned response, not to egoistical DNA duplication, but to ‘unselfish sensory evolution‘. Noteworthy is that we are simply reinforcing an underlying age-old truth. In the eighteenth century already, a philosopher named Bentham suggested a more enriching life formula (many others have as well).
Bentham postulated a theory concerning morals, in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Without conceptualising a goal-driven sensory evolution, grouping of cells, and the wholeness of it all, as in our discussion, he yet, aptly in line with it in principle, proposed the following:
‘The utility of anything should be judged by its ability to be more productive of pleasure or happiness, or more preventive of pain or unhappiness, than any alternative for the group’.
Instead of 'pleasure' and 'happiness', the word 'wellbeing' is also apt—the value of the consequences of an action determined by the welfare of individuals and all life forms in the ‘whole’.
The anxious look had disappeared from the Collie dog’s face and it was now snug in its little stainless steel cell on a soft warm blanket, recovering after the surgery. Although chest radiographs revealed some pulmonary bleeding, it was focal, and recovery should be complete. Mostly clinicians are mere spectators to this miraculous healing force of life in sense, and our part is indeed very small. We kept a morphine-enhanced drip slowly running into the vein and went home with, if anything, a sense of having done at least something, albeit relatively small, to prevent more suffering to this universal body of our sense.
A striking difference experienced working in developing world countries as opposed to the developed world was the higher prevalence of infectious diseases and parasitism (for obvious reasons) and lower incidence of cancers and allergies. My observations aren’t an attempt at a scientific recordings. They’re no more than a posteriori conclusions based on experience and mentioned here in the context of our quest. These numerous viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic, and protozoon diseases, together with a high number of trauma cases, kept us well occupied.
When infection risk is high, the immune system is normally in a primed alert state. Besides its cellular protective actions, the immune system, as mentioned, can be seen as having a dormant ‘sense’ with cognizant behaviour. It ‘senses’ potential threats and, by means of exact identification, it can identify infectious organisms and eliminate them. It can also, in forming bonds between a chemical and a protein structure (called haptens), identify chemical pathogenicity and react then indirectly to chemicals much smaller than the protein molecule antigens. This level of awareness of its environment is on a level non-existent to the mind. It then launches complex immune responses. As mentioned in essence, this is a form of cognition of the world around it. This immune system is ever adjusting to changing environments.
In a developed world enveloped in asepsis, this immune system becomes ‘bored’ (a term more aptly employed than most texts on this issue possibly had in mind). Such ennui increases the incidence of allergies, autoimmune diseases and indirectly cancers in our pet animals and us, as it goes about looking for something novel to identify with. Surrounded by many more chemical agents in the form of cleansing agents and cosmetics, all claiming to cause wondrous health improvements, and is this climate of excess, more and more reactions to these chemical haptens are becoming apparent and many carcinogens (cancer causing chemicals) are now recognised. In contrast, in the developing world one still comes face-to-face with real life-threatening infections and fewer allergies and cancers.
The dog was brought to the university clinic because its bizarre behaviour. It was still eating and the owner hadn’t noticed any vomiting or diarrhoea, but he was alarmed by the attitude change he’d seen in his dog. The dog, normally of temperate nature according to the owner, was now rather awkwardly, suddenly chasing cars and biting tyres and bumpers quite aggressively. Our ‘deranged’ patient was a white-coloured two-year-old Bull Terrier, a common breed for these parts due to their ‘property protective value’ and mostly seen at our clinic following traumatic incidents, solar dermatitis, or skin cancer. The owner, initially quite friendly, was one of the white farmers who lived across the ‘border’ and only came to our clinic in sheer desperation because there were no other clinics for another 150 kilometres or more. Attended to as ‘non-charity’ cases, they were obliged to pay full fee for services rendered.
The glazed, ‘wild’, emotionless eyes and the fact that it stared straight past and through me without any sense was reason for concern. In those parts, the meerkat was a rampant native animal and the most common carrier of the dreaded endemic disease, rabies. Due to the zoonotic ability of this truculent disease, it is part of veterinary training to consider rabies, where endemic, as a looming potential cause of neurological symptoms. This places a heavy burden on any vet, but even more so on young, fresh-faced new graduates.
To complicate matters, many other treatable diseases could also cause encephalitis and neurological signs in dogs and were common in those parts. Cerebral babesiosis, toxoplasmosis, neosporidiosis, and others can all affect the brain and cause similar symptoms. Therefore, to inform a pet owner that you may have to euthanase their pet in order to remove its brain for pathological examination only to see if it was rabies, was a rather challenging ordeal for any vet.
Sadly, virus isolation from the hippocampus, a small inner part of the brain, is the only means of confirming a diagnosis of rabies. Therefore, it was with some apprehension that I confronted the large frame of the known to be ‘right wing’ farmer to propose the danger to us and his family if we were dealing with rabies (what is best for the whole?). My rationale was even more shady with my link to ‘the left side’ of the political sphere in being associated with a ’black’ university. It certainly was a tough call, but the look in the dog’s eyes made me vehemently push for euthanasia as the best option. It was with clear uncertainty that the disgruntled farmer eventually signed the consent form.
Rabies infects its victim by means of viral-containing saliva getting into wounds or eyes. This horrifying disease has an affinity for nervous tissue, where it replicates and slowly migrates up along nerve axons to the brain, causing neuron destruction and a slow, malicious, but certain death. It is furthermore one of the few diseases that is not species specific and is non-selective in its destructive quest, cattle, horses, dogs, cats, and all mammals, including man, stand equally exposed to its savagery.
Ernest and I, adorned in conspicuously strange-looking plastic goggles to cover our eyes and with equally conspicuous red rubber gloves to protect our hands, approached the crazed animal on the back of the truck with some apprehension. Stephen King novels came to mind as I further reflected on our only good fortune: at least the bemused farmer was the single witness to the spectacle. His facial expression and attitude clearly indicated that he had proceeded from a state of bewilderment to acceptance that we were pathetic fools, completely beyond rescue. As we proceeded to noose the neck of the potentially rabid animal and edged it towards an outside kennel, the bumptious farmer drove off in a cloud of dust without a word of support, thanks, or an offer to pay, expressing his true concern for his dog (or life for that matter). The gratitude shown was in return for us risking our lives under dangerous and precarious conditions, to ensure the safety of him and his family.
It turned out that two weeks later an urgent phone call came from the Department of National Health, confirming a case of rabies. Ernest and I urgently had to go to the closest Department of Health office to get rabies booster shots. The farmer also had to get antiserum and vaccine. I could only hope they used the largest gauge needle in stock, since there never followed a thank-you or an attempt to pay the bill.
It is in such fear-driven, distrusting mental states that we block out the arcane and extraordinary and in overlooking the inherent benign intent of most people, we barricade our evolutionary sensory development. In a Darwinian sense, it fortifies our immediate world and objective beliefs in order to survive, but simultaneously it sets barriers. Just like the owner of the rabid dog, on a larger scale politicians and some economists today fail to listen to and recognise the present scientifically explored dangers and developed alternatives that are more benign.
Politics and economics are certainly not exempt from being the only guardians of our delicate destiny but science today possess the capability for our mass extinction, nowhere more so than in the fields of genetics and immunology. In the context of our discussion on basic immunology so far, imagine the consequences of a geneticist not in sense altering the basic DNA sequence (and thus antigenicity) of a virulent organism like a flu virus or bacterium. A simple and singular change can make this viral particle or bacterium, not only more virulent, but leave our unadjusted immune systems nakedly vulnerable to its destructive invasion. With our immune systems evolving simultaneously and coexisting with most organisms on our planet, our immune systems identify with them and keep them in check. Should our senseless geneticist or warmongers get hold of the concept of genetically altered pathogens sense is in deep trouble.
In the 1950’s and 60’s sense, confronted with the ‘wisdom’ of nuclear energy gave a few powerful individuals the capability to destroy the world, so far sense is winning but in a current world politico-religious climate the margin is narrow and fragile. Creating a few genetically modified pathogens in a lab with the capability of mass extinction may soon be within reach of many scientists. Again, if this sounds scary it truly should, as we speak geneticist have the capability not only to alter genomes of basic bacteria but also to synthetically make new life using basic DNA form Mycobacteria. Once such research is published it will give many scientists the ability, with the same ease as following a new cooking recipe in a fairly simply equipped laboratory, to ‘mess’ with life. If sense does not guide us here, we had better start queuing up for that appointment with the Termination Machine to save ourselves the agonising death gasps of some fatal respiratory or enteric disease.
Equally serious but possibly on a lighter note in view of the above, is the fact that optional energy sources to the petrochemical industry, with its pollutant and damaging effects on the health of our planet, are available and yet overlooked or outright discarded. The futility of war and the stratifying effects of politics, economics and religion are no more than emotional entrapment, utilising fear as motivator. This mindless exploitation of our world at the cost of a wealthy few individuals and nations is counter to the sensory advancement of our species and comparable with the religious hampering of scientific thinking about the universe during the Middle Ages. Sensory entrapment and narrow-visioned, often covetous and nepotistic trends in politics and economics have made the present human state hover around in blind greed rather than advancing at a faster than ever before pace in sense.
The price obtained, once freed from this Darwinian ensnarement, is life and sensory improvement beyond our wildest dreams—an emerging era, free of cruelty, war, greed, and misunderstanding, and replaced by a new era, filled with advancement and general wellbeing of the senses. We will sense the oneness of all and simultaneously be more aware of the nothingness of all—an autonomous, non-religious, new global nirvana where the objective all and the sense in between become the one truth in a healthy body.
Some may recognise a Zen aspect in this statement, but it is Zen with a twist—not detached enough to not be fully involved with the real world and sensory awareness and wellbeing of the whole. Zen alone certainly does not suffice on this level. In the ultimate Zen, a world where everybody has achieved a state of detachment and are un-opinionated, what next? Love, philosophically and definitional, is attached, at least to somebody, something, or some concept. To be detached enough to be even detached from the idea of complete detachment seems like heaven, but who steers the boat? How to love without at least some fear of loss? Such perplexing questions I don’t intend to answer here and I will let sense and other texts on these issues be our guide on this.
It would have been hard to ignore the sexual side of my relationship with Lisa at that time, but love was certainly a factor and, in a sense, the reason for her purity and understanding. She was aware of my intention to emigrate to England, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. The poverty, the innocence, and acceptance of it all with ease and grace made me feel duty bound to stay. The reigning conditions set by apartheid, however, convinced me to leave.
Chapter Eight
BEWARE (the utilitarians and elitists)
‘ Wanted to buy:
A Small Dog:
Mustn’t bark or bite; Must feed on broken glass And shit diamonds’. Goethe,c.1812
The Johannesburg-to-London flight left around nine at night and it was on a particular dark and sticky January night that I discovered how even bustling international airports can become incredibly forlorn places. I had said all my goodbyes to loved ones, and melancholy set in as I emerged into my uncertain future, boarding the expectant flight on that gloomy night. It felt like the plane and I were being sucked into a vacuum as the wheels left the tarmac.
My precarious future was not much supported by the fact I had no idea when, if ever, I would return to the beloved but mysterious and troubled continent slowly becoming only a mere memory with every mile the plane hurtled through space. The only pre-arranged certainty was a job as a locum vet at a veterinary practice in a village called Wallingford, located somewhere west of London, a place I struggled to find on my map of England. The clamour of the food trolleys finally settled and eventually the cabin lights in economy class thankfully dimmed.
The concept of economy class as opposed to business and first class has always perturbed me. Should such inequality be allowed (as at present), based on money, academic standing, or race, or shall we just leave it up to the ‘law of the jungle’ Darwinist values and fight our way to the most spacious seats with a window view? Alternatively, and more realistically, should all planes not be designed to have adequate space and seat comfort to cater equally well for everyone’s needs during at times very long flights around the world? Should we not all be able to, more affordably and freely move around the world? Should cabin staff not treat all humans with equal dignity regardless of their seat number?
In the years to come, I have sat in anything from rickety plane seats next to sweaty individuals with live chickens on their laps, to the comfort of spacious capsules with their own personal entertainment centres. I have found most people I inevitably ended up speaking to (an elbow in the stomach demands some form of familiarity) interesting and learnt from every single conversation at least something worthwhile. I have found that as long as an individual doesn’t exhibit aggressive or malicious tendencies (negative emotions), like the inclination to create barriers based on class, education wealth, or race, (the All Blacks beating the Wallabies in rugby may be overlooked) the conversations are interesting and mutually educational, and besides, sense can be gained in any seat number.
Snobbishness, elitism, aggressiveness, laziness, addictive behaviour, and slovenliness are expressions of negative emotions in fellow human beings that fill us with fear and, at times, disgust. The most revolting behaviour, however, is selfishness. We fear exhibiting or living in the same sphere of negativity. In turn, this fear further continues to segregate us even more by setting class, social, and unconscionable economic barriers. This enhances the vicious cycle of negativity by creating more barriers and greed.
Essentially, it is a cycle fuelled by fear, greed, and segregation, all of which are negative emotions. One can easily argue that there are those that break down Berlin walls, apartheid, and cultural barriers, and then there are those that aggravate division by means of economical misdistributions and setting class barriers on aeroplanes and other walks of life—concerted positive emotive behaviour in the first instance, in contrast to negative destructive behaviour in the latter. As fair as a call for equal global healthcare, not mentioned in the same breath, so too would be the call for spacious and standardised comfort in air travel, ‘world citizen-class’.
Therefore, it was with some unease of body, but acceptance of my niche in life, that I settled my six-foot frame into the small seat for the nine-hour flight. Pursuing my intrigue with Kant while avoiding the person’s elbow next to me, his thoughts in The Critique of Pure Reason became a welcome distraction:
‘Reason must be subject, in all its operations, to criticism, which must always be permitted to exercise its functions without restraint; otherwise its interests are imperilled and its influence obnoxious to suspicion. There is nothing, however useful, however sacred it may be, that can claim exemption from the searching examination of this supreme tribunal, which has no respect of persons. The very existence of reason depends upon this freedom; for the voice of reason is not that of a dictatorial and despotic power, it is rather like the vote of the citizens of a free state, every member of which must have the privilege of giving free expression to his doubts, and possesses even the right of veto.
But while reason can never decline to submit itself to the tribunal of criticism, it has not always cause to dread the judgement of this court. Pure reason, however, when engaged in the sphere of dogmatism, is not so thoroughly conscious of a strict observance of its highest laws, as to appear before a higher judicial reason with perfect confidence. On the contrary, it must renounce its magnificent dogmatical pretensions in philosophy.’
With such cogent expressions, Kant acknowledges the universality of freedom of reason. To some extend it is difficult to marry his subjectivity to an objective world with this freedom of reason and speech, which in turn must be distanced from objectivity to be truly free and non-dogmatic. The idea of reason, subject to judgement by a ‘supreme tribunal’, is also in conflict with Kantian objectivity. It insinuates, however, through lack of any other definition of this ‘supreme tribunal’, the subservience of pure human reason to sense. He thus also (possibly unknowingly) pre-empts the inescapable universal sense of reason governed by a pure deific Sense.
I concluded that in a truly liberated world, the whole issue of class-structured air travel would not be subjectively based on the dogmatics of Darwinian dominance but on a new age, more highly evolved morality and ethics. This, driven by purity of thought and benefits of evolutionary sensory advancement—and all seats would be spacious and comfortable, (although I do feel strongly about the seat size, it is used here ‘humorously’ as an allegory to make a point in sense).
We were awakened the next morning by the clattering of cutlery and trolleys soon followed by the cabin lights being turned on in a flurry, clearly a sign that we were expected to rise from our uncomfortable and cramped slumbers.
All the creatures I’d treated for the previous two years, my parents, friends, Ernest, Lisa, and all of Africa seemed dreadfully far away. The grey clouds outside covering Western Europe, in contrast, loomed eerily closer. I was instinctively nervous even then, before all my worldly adventures, of becoming a slave to inequality. I had preconceived the reality of it by seeing the poverty and medical depravity in Africa, existing in surrounds of the wealth of others, and I had heard about and witnessed before some of the extreme developed world excesses. The five million dollar annual incomes of drug company managing directors in the West shocked and disgusted me in view of my experience with how difficult it was to gain access to those expensive drugs in deprived communities. Should medicine with real therapeutic benefits not be distributed where it is most needed instead of where the most money lies? The logic of one individual earning such a large sum and the fact that the world’s wealthiest 150 individuals having the same combined wealth as 45% of the rest of the world’s population were incomprehensible statistics.
The objectivity and Kantian reality of developing a medicine with a cure or ease for the malaise of a disease is pure and in line with sensorial advancement. However, the fact that people and animals also somewhere, as I sat on the plane, were dying or suffering for no other reason than the lack of financial support to obtain such medicine or food is incomprehensible. Even a staunch Darwinist would have to flinch at such inequality. Most animals are solitary, and the higher capacity to live in social groups depends upon psychological specializations such as we have achieved. Our next phase of evolutionary sensory advancement surely demands us to address and improve such inequality and to urgently follow the divine drive to togetherness, fairness, and positive emotional expression.
It has been proposed by some socio-anthropologists, with more than naivety or utilitarian intent, that ‘creating across-the-board equality in a mass industrial ‘civilization’ is perhaps the most realistic prospect for a more ‘just and happy’ society’. Sounds acceptable so far. They, then, however, continue to suggest with more than fleeting implausibility, an arrangement where ‘there is an encapsulated hierarchy of resources with egalitarian arrangements among immediate acquaintances and differentials confined to a more abstractly reported level’.
Simply put, it implies a form of local equality and distant inequality. One can only wonder if perhaps these individuals were influenced by their scanty dealings with opinionated Darwinian genomics and its anticipated hope for ‘forced’ gene diversification. We may in the future be blessed with holiday packages to the land of the ‘short, hairy barbarians’ if we win an arm-wrestling competition as passport holders of the land of the ‘lean, intelligent tall’. Seriously, such narrow visioned approaches in a well-connected world through Internet and air travel will be difficult to maintain, unless under forced depravity or military regimes. We should be pardoned for our at times mere speechless gaping on hearing such ignorance, often expressed in an erudite manner by members of honourable professions.
Attention should be much more wisely directed at addressing subjective experiences of inequality in initiating the structures needed for the emergence of more sensible counter-dominance alliances to enforce sharing, rather than creating bureaucratic structures for adjusting objective, statistical (again that word) measurements of inequality. Amazingly, we have the sense to theorise about the Big Bang thirteen billion years ago, so surely it must be seen as shameful if we fail to accept the imminent danger hiding in global inequality and even vaguely consider any alternatives hinting towards a stratified society. Such disastrous moves will affect the wellbeing of our senses and hamper our sensory progress enormously, similar to removing the pancreas or liver from our body.
The early morning buzz and hum-drum of Heathrow airport appeared and disappeared in a flurry, dreamily replaced by the perfunctory shutting of train doors and solemn faces on a train that bulleted towards Piccadilly. One grey bleak building after another flickered by, occasionally and whimsically coloured by graffiti. Bemused after the long overnight flight and overwhelmed by the bleakness and austerity of images in my new world, the clarity and colour of sunlit objects and beaming African faces sadly began to fade.
However at times bleak in appearance it seems, London vibrant and challenging, is certainly always intellectually stimulating and one of the most exciting places in the English-speaking world. I spent a few days walking through endless alleyways absorbing the splendour of old buildings and exploring places that up until then were only familiar names. Leicester Square, St James Park, Soho, Covent Garden—whichever direction I went and wherever I emerged from the underground system, more interesting buildings and places appeared. I existed like an elated mole that had undergone revolutionary eye surgery.
I found myself attracted to the warmth and comfort of the National Gallery and spent endless hours staring at paintings that were up until then no more than pictures in books. The passion disclosed in some of these paintings and the emotions created when staring at a favourite painting is further evidence of sense through the ages; some of them oozed sense.
A brilliant and intriguing, slightly unsettling painting is discussed in the context of sense; 17th Century artist Joseph Wright titles it An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. The painting almost walks into you as you enter hall thirty-five (unless it has been moved now) on the northwest wing of the gallery. Interestingly, although not very well known, it does cause quite a few spectators to stop, linger and stare. See page 257 or,
(Visit: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-wright-of-derby-an-experiment-on-a-bird-in-the-air-pump.)
An emotionally charged painting, it depicts a travelling experimenter demonstrating the creation of a vacuum in a glass jar by pumping out the air. It does a lot more than this, however.
A small white (representing puerile innocence) cockatoo, has been placed in the jar to show the dramatic effect of creating a vacuum, simultaneously proving the existence of air and life’s dependency on it. On removal of the air, the bird becomes weaker and succumbs to an unsettling state of asphyxiation. Air pumps were familiar in Wright's day as a scientific ‘innovation’ with much scientific intrigue and utilised, in this case, as a rather crude way of demonstrating life’s dependency on air (oxygen).
In this ingenious artwork, the artist brilliantly records not scientific dexterity of the day, our dependency on oxygen or artistic talent only, but he captures the diversity of human feelings and emotions as challenged by objectivity____ in sense. Feelings and emotions brilliantly come across in this painting in the shadow of our capricious and objective impact on life in its fragile state.
Curtains drawn open by a complaisant young boy seen in the right hand background of the painting let in a patch of edifying moonlight through the uncertainty of ominous dark clouds. A prescient skull in a glass jar placed in the foreground creates awareness of our inevitable entrapment in an objective end. The luminous moonlight shining onto the small group depicts something ‘higher’ to aspire to in the pathos and uncertainty of an objective world as defined by ‘austere science’. The boy’s face expresses concern, but also hope in the release of moonlight (symbolising something higher to aspire to in sense) to ‘enlighten’ the scene. The togetherness and yet diversity of emotions in the group huddled together around the light, with the simultaneous distress of the struggling bird, is awe-inspiring.
The genius of this painting however, besides capturing a range of individual emotional reactions, lies in the artist’s ability to capture on canvas, by means of colour tones and lines, such feeling and emotion and a sense of the human condition as early as the seventeenth century.
Besides the indifference, as seen in the ‘dopaminised’ young lovers, and subjective austerity in the experimenter intoxicated by his scientific pursuit, we also can sense the smirk-like awe in the second young boy’s face on the left and comforting erudite support from the man with the dismayed young woman and the distraught small child. Most strikingly, the artist captured the emotion of a sad wisdom in a pondering philosopher in the right forehand (slightly darkened) corner of this masterpiece. Although he is off centre and in a shadow, Wright still managed to make the ‘thinker’ stand out as central to the theme.
This painting exemplifies emotions, togetherness, feeling, and sense as our only true guiding hope in an escape from blind scientific objectivity. It also gives meaning to this omnipresent sense throughout the ages.
As I sat afterwards in the museum cafeteria reflecting on my day, I could not help feeling slightly depressed. I realised my melancholy was caused by the fact that I failed to sense the same satisfaction I had just achieved inside the museum out there on the streets of London. Out there, it seemed to be crowded with men and women in black suits scattering about in a flurry to get back to some challenging ‘sentence’ in an office. These decent but obsequious men, driven by a dream that passed them by in the street with shapely hips and a tight blouse, sadly cannot wait for the end of the day to get to the pub. It also depressed me to realise that these ambitious peons of our society are merely objectively ‘used’ by modern capitalism to drive much of our precarious global economy and if it should fail, we all lose.
It was on a particularly rainy, cold, and bleak Monday morning in late January that I departed from Victoria Station to my first veterinary position outside Africa. I could not help feeling a sense of regret on leaving London for Wallingford after only three weeks, but after registering at the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, I now had to earn my keep.
Historically, Wallingford, founded by King Alfred in the early 10th century, is a good example of a Saxon burgh, or fortified town, with the earthwork defences still preserved. To me, the most striking feature was the old Wallingford-bridge and the beauty of the surrounding countryside. The alehouse, the Coach and Horses, was also notable, and my first introduction to an English country inn.
After a friendly but brief introduction to staff at the veterinary hospital, I was rushed straight into a white jacket and then into a room where I was confronted by restless pets of all descriptions and their concerned owners, all patiently waiting to see me. Initially overwhelmed by the volume and brevity of the consultations, I felt a bit lost, but demand set the pace and soon I was whisking through cases to a point where at the end of the day, few of my new patients or their owners could be recalled in their true sense.
My second morning in Wallingford transpired rather abruptly after a demanding late night ensuing from an introductory visit by my new colleagues to the Old Ale House. Therefore, it was with a head filled with more than a bit of uncertainty that I was to confront a ‘downer cow’ as my first patient the following wet and cold day.
Green, lush, sprawling meadows of the English countryside, as a travel guide extracted image would depict this part of rural England quite accurately, stretched around me as I approached the homestead. No travel guide or veterinary textbook, however, had prepared me on how to locate, much less on how to raise a recumbent cow in such a wet, misty English marshland. The guidance given to me by a preoccupied farmhand appeared to be more of a luxury than the regular vet received, who it seemed would in some arcane way have known exactly where to locate the cow. I was faced by a green meadow with sleeting rain and grey mist and then abandoned by the farmhand, with a, ‘Somewhere down yonder she’d be’.
It was hard to tell who was more amazed, the Holstein cow or me, when I finally, wet and cold to the bone, stumbled more by chance than anything else on the rotund black-and-white figure lying comfortably on its large abdomen, ruminating away. Anxiously, I hoped that I could simply bend and pinch the tail to make it jump up and merrily rush off whilst still happily ruminating, expressing vitality. My desperate manoeuvre encouraged nothing more than a fleeting increase in the frequency of masticator muscle activity. The well-worn little black medical bag contained an assembly of injectable antibiotics, steroids, and hormones, all rather impracticable under the prevailing conditions.
Based on the medical history given to me by the peremptory clinic receptionist, dystocia (difficult birth) and toxins were all ruled out. Therefore, what remained as possible causes (differential diagnoses) of the solitary bovine’s state of recumbence were numerous metabolic diseases, nutrient deficiencies, infectious causes, or possibly trauma. I had no realistic cure in my medical bag and with the unlikelihood of a theurgical lifting crane appearing to assist me, I opted to leave with no more than blood samples and a record of the unfortunate cow’s heart rate and temperature. Since all four legs were either tucked or buckled underneath the animal’s large frame, spinal trauma or a broken leg as a cause of its immobility were likely and difficult to rule out.
It was with dismay later that day that I overheard a prosaic telephonic conversation between the senior vet and the farmer. Unenlightened prescience, directed by dollar value, had determined the fate of the non-ambulatory bovine. The animal’s ‘value’ was apparently less than the potential cost of medical care. The innocent eyes and emotive calm that surrounded the lonely animal in the meadow haunted me with horrible images of its possibly ruthless transportation to some iniquitous abattoir and a certain brutal death at such a slaughterhouse. I had failed dismally in responding to a sentient being’s respectful and hopeful reliance on improved sensory development to be more than its pretentious, primitively entrapped Darwinist self, as it yet again proved to be.
Bailliere’s Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary (1988) defines humane killing (is there such a thing?) for farm animals as___ ‘…producing unconsciousness of head in carbon dioxide, gas, electrical shock...all of them aiming to allow the animal to bleed out while it is still alive. An animal that is dead before it has bled out will be unsuitable for marketing.’
The latter definition regards stunning as rendering an animal unconscious, and the exsanguination as the cause of death. However, the Oxford English Dictionary (1989) says that the aim of stunning is… ‘to deprive of consciousness or power of emotion by a blow, a fall, or the like’…
The general leaning in commercial meat production, with its origin as a sub-discipline of public health, is an obsessive involvement with food hygiene and freshness. I recall the at times ludicrous emphasis in veterinary training, backed by endless lists of potentially harmful food toxins and food borne bacteria. Ironically, such tutorials were exchanged for lectures in neuroanatomy, detailing the location of pain centres, or others in pain physiology, describing the neurotransmitters involved in nerve conduction. Such is the blind duality of the utilitarian human mind. With emphasis overwhelmingly placed on the disease-causing potential of these ‘ghoulish’ little zoonotic organisms and their exotoxins, the actual horrific death their sentient hosts had to succumb to in order to keep us higher primates free of gastrointestinal upset (vomiting and diarrhoea being the main symptom of the majority of food poisoning cases) was astonishingly disregarded.
Is our evolutionary primitiveness the best we can offer to furnish us with an excuse for such evil doing, serving as a means of cheating our own conscience? Utilitarians argue that we need the protein, minerals, and vitamin B in meat. It has also been proposed by utilitarian philosophers that hardly any action can securely be laid down as always obligatory or always condemnable (duality of the mind). In the context of a patterned universal drive for advancement of sensory wellbeing, the emphasis is on what is right for all sentient beings (all, including man and animals, unless we return to our opening debate). More recently, the impact of meat farming on the environment has added even more substance of the self-destructive impact on progress of sense if such brutality should continue.
The casuistry of utilitarianism is quickly exposed if confronted by a predestined, goal-directed force. It serves no other purpose but to expose its urge to seek at times blind support for the negative aspects of the duality in emotive behaviour, with the emphasis on short-term self-gratification, counter to the deification of group wellbeing.
Take an example of a utilitarian confronted by meat eating with the knowledge that it is a good source of vitamin B and iron. The utility-based outlook of the doctrine would make their carnivorous habit an obvious choice for the utilitarian, disregarding the severe negative impact on many other sentient beings and the environment. The same self-absorbed readily acceptable adoption of accepting poverty and the stratification of our global society is typical of the utility-based doctrine of utilitarians. Their self-absorbed believe in happiness and usefulness as a yardstick for utility of a deed is indeed much too simplistic and disregarding of the holistic complexity of living beings and their emotive responses to be in line with the demands of group sensory wellbeing. The same blind stupidity reigns when believing that addressing global warming is an issue that future generations will deal with, since we still seem to be OK.
If the utility of a deed is based on its emotional outcome (such as happiness) then the effect of such a deed and its emotional response on the group (in its totality) wellbeing is certainly a better measure and more relevant and an important advance for utilitarians. Either way the simplistic approach of using a happiness outcome by utilitarians disregards the phylogenetic complexity of emotive behaviour and its group-based perplexities. Happiness, being a fleeting and temporary emotive response, is only a small aspect of emotional being and is mostly subject to relativism and stratification. The only place where it could find some comfort was in a primitive Darwinian system controlled by a selfish-DNA, but that era has now thankfully also almost come and gone if we give sense a chance.
To those utilitarians who necessarily believe that whatever our sensory advancement has thought fit to reveal on the subject of morals, a word of caution. Utilitarians (many world leaders fit this picture) are apt to make their own particular exception to moral rules and, when under temptation, will see a utility in the breach of a rule, greater than seen in its observance. This exposes them to nepotism, greed, and as the instigators of war. This narrow-vision approach of utilitarians, with its entrapment in basic Darwinist values and Kantian objectivity, has a dampening effect on sensory amelioration. It offers no more than fugacious satisfaction of primitive hunter gatherer instincts, even more pitiful, fleetingly so.
My non-utilitarian views, needless to say, ensured pet animal practice to be more befitting of my quest. It was thus with great zest that I set of to my next position as a companion animal assistant in Norwich, East Anglia.
Train travel in England, and for that matter, in most of Europe, is always an exciting and pleasant experience to the newcomer. Trains are fast and contrasting scenery rapidly exchanged, from green fields to sudden eruptions of old buildings, cathedrals, and quaint villages. Late eighties, early nineties England lost the rebellious atmosphere of the sixties and seventies and instead got caught in the doldrums of materialism, Madonna, and yuppies. The ‘zombification’ of society by computers and the Internet was in its infancy at the time. Therefore, with four days free before the start of my work commitment in Norwich, I decided to head up north to the city of York. My intention was to explore some of the Yorkshire countryside made famous by a colleague, James Herriot, on the way. In my desultory pursuit, I ended up spending my first night in a small bed and breakfast establishment opposite the York Minster.
My lodgings on that fortuitous night happened to be the birthplace of the infamous Guy Fawkes and the date, as fate determined, was July 9, 1984. On that ill-fated night a bolt of freak lightning struck the York Minster and set the cathedral’s roof alight.
I was sitting up in bed, witnessing the dancing patterns on the walls in a room aglow with shades of orange. I had to contemplate the possibility of the flamboyant display being part of special effects that came as a hidden bonus with such an infamous house. The truth behind the display was revealed, however, when urgent knocking and two Bobbies at the door advised me to get ready to evacuate the building. A bolt of lightning had struck on a cloudless night and set the roof of the Minster on fire. The following extract from the front page of the next morning’s Yorkshire Morning Press was evidence of our ludicrous utilitarian approach to use even freak events in supporting a specific belief.
Among those who suggested that the fire might have been an act of God, was a York resident who suggested as follows: ‘There are instances recorded in the Bible of divine retribution and thunderbolts from heaven. It makes you wonder if God is expressing anger at the controversy.’ Even more amusing, the controversy was all about a certain Reverent John Mowil’s protest against the consecration of the Bishop of Durham. The utilitarian manner in which stratified groups manipulate everything, at times bordering on the ridiculous, to their own benefit clearly shows it dangers, especially when it comes to more important issues.
This trait is evident through the ages, where religion has been turned and twisted to suit utilitarian needs. This self-centred narcissism inherent in humans to attach so much value to their own being that they consider themselves as chosen ones or await for signs from above to worship and direct their deeds has its origins in our primitive animal origins and is driven by fear of the unknown and unascertainable qualities of the world around us.
I have suggested that the only way to move closer to the inescapable divine order and its deific goal is through positive emotive behaviour and setting suitable conditions for advanced sensory development, not only individually but especially at group level. Anything less will result in vain attempts at self-gratification and utilitarianism. We should absorb the daily news and politicians’ opinions with caution and for no more than fleeting entertainment value; if their principle aim remains to create stratification and awe amongst readers and followers. Without being dogmatic, I do believe the most sensible lifestyle choices include reading newspapers sensibly and between the lines and exposing oneself only to select amounts of television, at least until sense emerge more fully.
If we now consider a utilitarian failing to get objectively what it set out to achieve___ happiness__ it becomes unhappy and depressed. More and more, with research on mental disorders now coming to the fore and with better imaging technology set in an era of gene mapping, we can tag areas of anatomical or physiological deficiency in the brain. A typical area of interest due to its emerging presence is in depression (we can suspect why), where a small zone high in serotonin called region Twenty-five of the brain has recently been proven to be less active in depressed patients. This leads to poor communication with other parts of the brain. Furthermore, it also leads to unsocial behaviour and isolation. What this means is that, on an anatomical level, brain subsections with less connection and interaction with other parts are the causes of mental illness. On a larger scale, it segregates sufferers from society. A society fluctuating between depressive and utilitarian is undeniably dysfunctional and miscreants of sense. Currently our society exists entirely between these extremes, for reasons I hope are clear by now. Also for reasons I hope are clear by now, these depressed individuals are not weak Darwinian recluses of society to be overlooked and ignored, but are valuable members of sense in need of support to assist our cause.
In guiding sense back to health, our duty lies in steering utilitarians away from the pleasure of the moment and depressives both back to new hope in sense.
Again, there is an urgent call for a global system in support of complete and respectful togetherness, home to a benevolent society sharing and gaining knowledge to the benefit of all, with no stratification as directed by objective localised utilitarian needs of the moment.
Chapter Nine
LOVE is all there is
Norwich, East Anglia, an inviting city of cathedrals and pubs. The veterinary clinic was well equipped, the staff friendly and helpful, and the clients warm-hearted and caring, any vets dream work environment. However, deviant cases always pop up unexpectedly.
It was on a routine morning with the usual flow of vaccinations, coughing, and itchy skin dogs that Sid arrived on the scene. The spiky purple wheel of hair on his head and the black leather outfit with large chain attached at first startled me, especially since I saw no pet or pet carrier with the owner of the apparel. When I saw a large rat emerge from the sleeve of his leather jacket, I at least felt more at ease that the owner came to the right establishment.
‘She ain’t eating’’, were the only words offered by the inarticulate owner of Sid (short for Sid Vicious, as I was soon to discover). I started examining Sid by trying to assess his eye mucosa for colour. A sudden sharp stinging bite on my thumb resulted in an instinctive withdrawal of my hand with the large rodent still tenaciously attached to it. It was with great alarm that I observed the now detached Sid propel through the air to hit the clinic wall with a foredoomed thud. Ashen-faced, I called Jane, the nurse, at first thought more as re-enforcement than as a rescue effort for Sid.
Either way, I briskly scooped Sid up from the floor and recall fleetingly calling ‘Oxygen!’ as a ran to the treatment room, possibly hinting more to my needs than Sid’s. Fortuitously, Sid was still breathing and appeared amazingly unscathed by his airborne emprise. After a full clinical examination, done under sedation, we discovered he was suffering from nothing more than a piece of husk lodged in his gum. The owner (unless left speechless at the time) turned out to be a benign personality and apparently understanding of our misfortune.
Even with all the good intentions in the world (and on much larger scale), at times things do go wrong. If the intentions were to do good and to benefit the whole, there can be no blame, and all we can do is record and possibly learn from our mistakes. How sense has advanced! Once considered vermin we now have great knowledge about rodent health issues, and in sense, we care for them with loving affection.
Cosy pubs, long walks along scenic canals, and tranquil Sunday drives through the East Anglican countryside made my first English summer a memorable and pleasant ordeal. The seasonal changes and autumn colours were equally stimulating. With a steady and pleasant workload at the surgery, I was starting to fall in love with East Anglia, Norwich and England.
It was only around midwinter on snow days that things turned a bit low-key at the surgery. On one such a colourless day with no nurses being able to get to the clinic due to severe weather, I, having a flat upstairs at the surgery, was the only person on duty. My only patient for the entire day arrived in a child’s sleigh pulled by a middle-aged man, shuffling his way through to the main entrance of the surgery. A recumbent English setter gave a lazy tail wag as I bent down to examine it, anxiously hoping that the situation wouldn’t require nursing assistance or surgery.
The beneficence in the dog’s face and an apparently healthy clinical examination initially left me puzzled as to the cause of her non-ambulatory state. Neurological or muscular malfunction were all that remained as possible causes, or so it seemed until I happen to look under the dog’s pads. All her pads were cracked and bleeding. Her rotund figure and painful pads were hardly conducive to locomotion. Ice-induced cracked pads was the diagnosis, and my first such case since arriving from the African plains. Pain relief, antibiotics, and antiseptic washes were the only treatment I could offer, besides admitting her to the clinic and sparing her a cold and stressful journey home. It also meant I had a benevolent companion for what became a quiet and lonely day.
More snow arrived and edaciously crept up to the windows and doors. My only companion and I were finally completely cut off from the rest of the world.
The interconnection of sense in the life force is ubiquitous and miraculous in its design for unity. Besides our limited sensory awareness and its struggle for advancement, other systems are constantly at play in this goal-directed patterned synchrony of sense. Two pea-sized glands in front of the kidneys release essential hormones with the ability to affect the brain and immune system, though it can influence all body cells and life around it as well. These hormones, cortisone, aldosterone, some sex steroids, and opioid-type endorphins, affect the brain and most of our actions.
The thalamus, a central part of the ‘primitive’ brain, releases a protein, corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH), which in turn stimulates the pituitary gland at the base of the brain to release a hormone (ACTH) that stimulates these two little adrenal glands. The hormones then released by these glands, as mentioned, have an impact on all cells. Astonishingly they communicate, cells contain receptors to recognise these adrenal hormones, without such receptors, the hormones will have no impact, and the cells remain unaware of their presence (a bit, like the current limits of human perception). This yet again acts as evidence of a patterned drive for interconnectivity and a striving sense in all things, way beyond the needs for only survivalist needs. The story continues.
A bit of neuroanatomy (since objectively our awareness of sense originates here) and endocrinology is called for first. The hippocampus (a small part at the base of the brain), contain high levels of adrenal steroid receptors and is a malleable brain structure that is important for various types of learning and memory. It is also vulnerable to the effects of glucocorticoid (cortisol) by virtue of these receptors. Another part of the brain, the amygdala, is an important target of stress and mediates physiological and behavioural responses associated with fear and strong emotions. The prefrontal cortex plays an important role in working memory and executive functions involved in learning. All three regions are targets of stress and corticosteroids released by the adrenal glands in front of the kidneys.
The complex effect of these corticosteroid hormones on cells and intercommunication between the outside world, brain, immune system, and endocrine system is remarkable if viewed as a less obvious sense system instead of the traditional objective way. The pattern remains.
These corticosteroids and mineralocorticoids (aldosterone) can create a sense of euphoria in the brain in small bursts, but if chronically and persistently released in excess, can cause depression and neuron death. They keep a constant supply of glucose and maintain electrolyte homeostasis in brain cells. Their impact on the immune system is, in turn, the suppression of an enzyme, another protein (named phospholipase A2), which, when reduced, results in suppression of part of the immune response. As a matter of interest, many current-day pain relief medications such as aspirin block this phospholipase enzyme cascade on different levels. All these drugs, grouped under the heading non-steroid anti-inflammatories, execute their pain relief and anti-inflammatory actions in this way.
This suppression of phospholipase enzyme by corticosteroids causes a reduction of the cellular response (part of immune system) to protein structures foreign to the body (infection) and is a key player in protecting against stimulation of an autoimmune attack (self-attack) on brain cells. Interestingly, even on this level some sense of wellbeing comes with the glucocorticoid release. In both dogs and humans, cortisone is believed to affect mood, behaviour, and brain excitability. Their ultimate goal is harmony and protection, for the organism but also indirectly then on a group social level. However, in excess (with chronic stress, anger or worry) and with prolonged constant release they are harmful to neurons and health. Again who said greed is good!
The importance of this involvement is to emphasize how hormones (protein structures) are employed to assist the drive towards interconnectivity and affect sensory behaviour and protection with a resultant social impact. Such a scheme should re-emphasise the importance of hormones and the immune system as sense channels again conducive to group wellbeing and not as destructive and aggressive self-absorbed collaterals to a hierarchical survivalist theory in a Darwinian world.
I noticed that Tammy, the English setter, gulped down her water persistently and anxiously. She also eliminated endless volumes of urine every time I managed to get her up and out to the indoor run. Her enlarged ‘potbelly’-appearing abdomen also made me worry. Our companion animals can have very subtle ways of exhibiting disease or a state of metabolic malfunction. Increase thirst (polydipsia) and urination (polyuria) would often be the only symptoms exhibited to warn that something is amiss, and in some cases less observant owners may miss such fine-spun symptoms.
What concerned me at the time was that Tammy might have renal failure, diabetes, or most likely, Cushing’s disease. I also had to convince her owners that running blood tests in order to find out more was essential to her long-term health. It was easier than most cases where, at times, when cost is mentioned reluctance to pursue a case may set in, especially if it doesn’t appear obviously life-threatening to the pet at the time.
The snow lingered for a few more days on the windowpanes, but some staff and patients returned the next morning. It took two days (before the advent of now common in-house laboratories) to run the blood tests and to receive all the test results from a laboratory. The results supported a diagnosis of Cushing’s disease, also known as hyperadrenocorticism. This disease is characterised by an excess of cortisol in the blood. Either this is caused by a small-localised tumour or enlargement in the pituitary gland at the base of the brain (central), or in the adrenal gland itself (localised), both with the potential to an increased release of cortisol. This not only typifies the vulnerable state of sense under changing environmental and chemical influences but also its patterned omnipresence.
Such strife in sensory perception, although force- and goal-directed, offers at times enterprising diversions from the norm. Albeit harmful and objectively interpreted as a debilitating and malicious disease, Cushing’s disease and the like are merely aberrant expressions of an anxious exploration of sense’s search for advancement, rather than an abolition of the weak from a Darwinian viewpoint.
What a strict Darwinian and a survivalist outlook on life and utilitarians have in common is a dominant but insular sensory determinism to link everything to our primitive phylogenetic objective thinking. This reasoning advances slowly on a tightrope suspended by principles of individualist survival and narcissistic fitness. As experienced and deducted, a universal drive to positive responsive expression in order to assist any aspect of sensory progression is conducive to creating the global state of interconnectivity and wellbeing that is urgently needed for our post-Darwinist transition.
Here now Kant again in The Critique of Pure Reason:
‘It is by means of the transcendental unity of apperception that all the manifold, given in an intuition is united into a conception of the object. On this account it is called objective, and must be distinguished from the subjective unity of consciousness, which is a determination of the internal sense, by means of which the said manifold in intuition is given empirically to be so united. Whether I can be empirically conscious of the manifold as coexistent or as successive, depends upon circumstances, or empirical conditions. Hence, the empirical unity of consciousness by means of association of representations, itself relates to a phenomenal world and is wholly contingent. On the contrary, the pure form of intuition in time, merely as an intuition, which contains a given manifold, is subject to the original unity of consciousness, and that solely by means of the necessary relation of the manifold in intuition to the ‘I think’ consequently by means of the pure synthesis of the understanding, which lies a priori at the foundation of all empirical synthesis. The transcendental unity of apperception is alone objectively valid; the empirical which we do not consider in this essay, and which is merely a unity deduced from the former under given conditions in concreto, possesses only subjective validity. One person connects the notion conveyed in a word with one thing, another with another thing, and the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical, is, in relation to that which is given by experience, not necessarily and universally valid.’
Inevitably, it must be accepted that Kant also struggles with the security offered by an objective world alone as a predominant return value of the self and our interpretations of the world around us. If we consider our interpretations of the objective world as predeterminants of the objective world, what determines how we interpret this objective? Is it not the freedom of the sense, existing in being, and its release from imprisonment by the chains of subjective objectivism- sensing the sense in the object and our awareness of this sense? This is all I offer (in sense) as a counter argument to Kant in the above.
Mr Brown was not a wealthy man and he stated as much in an unfeigned manner as we discussed Tammy’s blood test results and further treatment options. The most stressful aspect of being a veterinarian is not the euthanasia of a terminally ill and suffering animal, but the indirect consequences of financial constraints governing application of proper healthcare and treatment. The same financial constraints are seen in human medicine.
Whilst working in Africa at a university closely linked to a mission hospital, I experienced financial constraints causing unforgivable loss of human life as well. The noble souls, doctors and nurses surrendering well-paid jobs in the developed world to do the best they could under these conditions, must be seen as the ultimate expression of sensory advancement. The financiers and governments failing to deliver adequate funding are ultimately the failures in our sensory advancement.
Therefore, it is with more than usual care, dedication, and tapping on all available knowledge and resources a vet enrols on such an expensive treatment to a less materialistic caring client. It isn’t due to the objectivity of money, but due to the social and emotional responsibility of such a situation. I have found that if the motive is in any way utilitarian or dictated purely by self-absorbed financial or malpractice concerns, the level of care and treatment standard will drop, and as such will be unjust to the patient’s demands and the kind-hearted concerns of owners. This principle should apply to government and business as well. Why should only dedicated healthcare workers act with compassion and moral guidance, while business and politics run on separate values? Are we not, all on different levels, equally socially and morally bound to be less mercenary?
Most veterinarians deal with an astonishing array of philosophical and moral approaches among pet owners. Such as the callous, financially comfortable ‘middle or upper class’ individual who considers a five hundred pound pet medical bill too much of a negative impact on the next trip to Spain or cruise in the Caribbean and who would ‘rather not spend that much on a pet’. These unhappy individuals, as a rule, would begrudgingly complain about everything, question all proposals, and loudly (and at times aggressively) express their distrust in fellow human beings, an altogether sorrowful state of negative emotions. We should note that great material wealth may also equate to sense (or may not), as all else may or may not. Some great wealthy men tend to be philanthropists and men of passion directed to serve humankind, like John D. Rockefeller, Carnegie and recently Gates- all donating large parts of their wealth to sensible charitable causes and pursuing their goals with passion for their work and what it can do for society, not the money. Wealth happens as Sense happens; it does so in an atmosphere of concerted effort with compassion and selflessness.
Then there are the Mr Browns of the world, the essence of positive emotive expression and the backbone of our evolutionary quest, who also make society function. A quiet, contemplative man who spend most of his hard-working life in an ‘underpaid’ job, carefully listening to all I had to say and at times prompting me to clarify. In possession of practically acquired wisdom and possibly having had enough exposure to the harsh financial realities of Darwinian life, he had to consider all options. Without doubt, he knew that to give life a chance at all the cost is morally just and his main motive, even if it did mean possibly inflicting some financial hardship on himself in the months to come.
His decision, in line with sense, went beyond the love for his pet companion. On par with the doctors and nurses offering their care with sincere empathy in deprived communities, he also had acquired the wisdom and skills to live life positively. Hardships aside Mr Brown was still a happy individual, fresh and young-faced for his age, accepting his lot in life patiently and wisely, and mostly left no negative impact or hurt on society. Such a noble individual could at times be considered an underachiever, if measured by financial and academic status in a stratified Darwinian society. Yet, his achievement in simple happiness and content backed by positive emotive behaviour unknowingly contributed more to life’s sensory quest than an unconcerned, rude, and greedy learned individual ever would.
The sense in this lies secure in the chain reaction of socially positive and caring interactions a life filled with positive emotional encounters will trigger. Opposing this is the aggressive individual with countless negative emotional encounters affecting individuals hurtfully and at times unjustly. If such individuals ever do obtain financial or other rewards in society, it is either abruptly lost again or never offers the peace of mind and wellbeing they set out to achieve.
It was with complete commitment and dedication that Tammy was thus treated. The cracked pads were slow to heal due to the cortisol excess (a hallmark of Cushing’s disease) and its immunosuppressive effects. Besides the arduous diagnostics and care offered, unfortunately, the medication needed was unrealistically expensive, more so than all the effort in diagnosis and nursing.
Entrapped in our Darwinian past, with its subjective thinking, we accept the cruelty of a stratified financially-driven society with infantile ease. In a society where some sentient beings cannot afford medicine due to exorbitant costs, we consider ourselves psychologically stable, merely because we get emotionally upset if we see a starving child or a hurt puppy. We do little more about it.
Such antagonism between opposing forces, which constitute human emotion, is presented by Schelling in Ages of the World. He argues that the world, whose origins the ‘Welalter’ wishes to understand, must entail the same opposing forces which still act, though not necessarily in the same form, in this world, of which the mind is an aspect: ‘Poured from the source of things and the same as the source, the human soul has a co-knowledge/con-science (Mitwissenschaft) of creation.’ Schelling suggests that there are two conflicting principles in us: ‘…an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious principle’, which must yet in some way be identical. One aspect of being, the dark force, which he sometimes terms ‘gravity’, is contractive, the other expansive, which he terms ‘light’. Confucius and others preached similar concepts.
The fact that drug companies manufacture numerous drugs and then aggressively market them in developed countries (where they are often needlessly overused) at great cost and with their long- and short-term side effects at times vastly understated, is truly the contractive aspect of being. I need to clarify such an attack mindful of the monies required to research, clear safety issues, and market these drugs, but in sense we have alternative options.
Mild combinations of anti-inflammatories/analgesics, referred to as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID) as mentioned above, is also where the money lies for pharmaceutical companies. With minimal pain relief benefits, they have comparatively lenient, but much understated, side effects. Although they do have a place in healthcare, they are greatly overused, for anything from migraines to period pains and even influenza. Not much advertised is adverse drug reaction data.
This reads for 2004 at least 100,000 hospitalisations and 10,000 deaths per year in the USA alone are linked purely to NSAIDs. Admittedly, some of these deaths most likely occurred because of abuse of these drugs but where lies our duty, were any of these people dying of a headache or period pain? Less well documented and well tucked away in the literature, to mention only one such concern, is the possibility that simultaneous use of birth control pills with some of these products could potentially be causing primary idiopathic hypertension (high blood pressure of ‘unknown’ cause) in people. Other overpriced, over-prescribed medicines are plentiful, antacids and statins (cholesterol lowering drugs catering mostly for meat eaters and smokers) being only two other groups. The ‘expansive aspect’ of our dualistic existence would ensure drug manufacture in order to supply every sentient being on our planet with truly needed medicine backed by adequate and unbiased research—not cover-ups on the big money spinning ‘skimpy’ drugs in the developed world or market exploitation of mild or no-effect supplements and alternative remedies. The argument of needing these skimpy money-spinners to back research on the real life saving medicines simply does not hold in view of the enormous profits shown by these drug companies.
Jerome Barkow has suggested a triad of social instincts—status-seeking, nepotism, and mutual reciprocity (Barkow’s triad of social instincts, 1992)—as a cause for such crude unfairness. When operating upon surplus resources, Barkow argues, the surplus will lead to unequal distribution of resources. Humans will compete for status and high status individuals will be able to appropriate and store a greater than equal share of resources enhancing their (guess what) DNA spreading potential. We can see that from both a philosophical and a social anthropological aspect, sensory advancement would not benefit from this, as it would leave the low status individuals (with sensible genes) feeling mentally insecure, angry, suppressed or cheated__ could even instigate war.
Anthropologists believe that human psychology was shaped by and adapted to an egalitarian social environment from the word go, with resources equally shared on a day-by-day basis ensuring survival (Diamond, 1992; Charlton, 1996). Egalitarianism, in an ‘ancestral society’, remained roughly constant for approximately two million years of hominid evolution, and through most of the existence of homo sapiens from the emergence of the species about 150,000 years ago. Geographical isolation was principally the cause of the stratification seen between developed and undeveloped parts of the world today. If our counter-dominance instincts were active in early hominid evolution, and even more so today in a new interconnected world, we should provoke its beneficial presence and share all medical advances equally.
It was with dismay (also fully aware that none of my patients in the developing world could remotely afford it) that I dispensed Tammy’s extremely costly medicine, aware of the omissions that would enter Mr Brown’s basic existence for the next while. I could only hope for an urgent onset of our post-Darwinian transition to an enlightened sensory awakening where all creatures and beings will get required medicines at true value without cost barriers, regardless of status or geographical location. Sensory expansion would surely predicate that all sentient beings born into this life are equally entitled to medicine that could relieve suffering when needed. The cruelty of our present Darwinian era cannot but evoke awe and pity about the monetary objectivity of our human condition. Even more so in view of some of the pharmaceutical company CEOs earning exorbitant salaries at times with financial loss or recessions affecting the rest of us (including the companies under their management).
My late evening after-work walk along Constitution Hill Road on the outskirts of Norwich was always a thrilling and pleasant experience. The magical lush of summer greenery was surreptitiously replaced by the snow-covered fields of winter with its fond memories of deer, carrying their majestic antlers, mysteriously appearing out of nowhere in frozen strips of forest.
Time spent in country inns and taking long weekend drives across East Anglia was joyful and memorable, and I fell in love with England to a point of considering settling down. Yet, as the seasons came and went, I wanted to experience more of old Europe and the origins of some of my mentors in sense- the impressionists, philosophers, and to walk in streets where names like Kant, Schelling, Spinoza, Mozart, Bach, Goethe, van Gogh and Vivaldi walked some centuries before.
Chapter Ten
Our DOINGS here
‘As individuals we know perfectly well that we may admire another person for their intelligence, for their generosity, for their kindness and so on.’ John Armstrong, The Secret power of Beauty.
A medical researcher in Switzerland stumbled upon an obvious but amazingly simple and overlooked cure for cancer. His first feelings weren’t of relief in realising the abolition of decades of human and animal suffering but of a self-centred egotistical sense of self-importance and financial reward. An acquisitive international patent lawyer promptly proceeded to negotiate a deal between a well-known drug company and the researcher.
The cure was subsequently marketed at an exorbitant price, as calculated by company accountants to be the optimum charge to achieve maximum income for the drug company. Such an optimum market price was arrived at by using an established economical principle, unwisely stating that if a company charges X amount more for a commodity, Y% of sales can be lost to people who cannot afford it and overall the profit to the company is still optimum.
To arrive at the ‘prime’ optimum selling price, all still needed would be market surveys on what people could afford or were prepared to pay for such a commodity (based on opinion polls and statistics). In this case, since most sane people would certainly want to cure their cancer, the ones left out would be the cancer victims without adequate healthcare protection or the funds to obtain the therapy. The result, selling the cure to fewer of the more affluent members of society at a higher price; this can be mitigated by a survival of the fittest concept. The optimum marketing price would exclude many cancer victims in the developing world and some in the developed world from obtaining the treatment.
A Nobel Prize, newspaper headlines, and endless interviews bestowed on our scientist on that joyous occasion all suddenly become meaningless in the scheme of things. It was nothing more than a fleeting and meaningless objective form of self-gratification. Relatively little has changed. People are still suffering and dying as only the ‘lucky fit’ ones received some benefit. We must keep in mind that all of humanity has carried our researcher (yes, even the lowly paramecium in the pond) to acquire the knowledge, built on colleagues’ publications and ancestral wisdom, to this moment of enlightenment and the potential to end at least one aspect of senses’ evolutionary challenges. Seen in this light, there is no place for egoistic greed. Such a monistic objective action as performed by our scientist has dealt another blow to the patterned good that could truly have sped up the process of our combined sensory advancement.
However, let’s say our researcher takes a sense-enhancing drug, flooding his overused neurons with dopamine and serotonin. In an enlightened state, he senses the truth. The next day, after dismissal of a rather disgruntled lawyer (refusing to take the drug), a copy of the research is delivered to every single drug manufacturer on the planet and changes the destiny of our sensory wellness.
In the latter scenario, in line with sensory advancement and ‘expansive’ emotive behaviour, the world and all its creatures in sense have won. In the first scenario, all advances would lead to further stratification and unequal sharing of resources, besides the ongoing misery already suffered by many.
The story continues. At least somewhere in the world, one or more cancer suffers who potentially couldn’t afford the cure were now cured. Some continued living, making major contributions to society. They became good teachers, doctors, scientists, or enriched our lives through the arts and by making other positive impacts on our global society, (one of the recovered developed an improved version of the treatment).
On my arrival in Switzerland, I had plenty of time to ponder life and my role in it. After the hustle and bustle of Zurich, the green sloping fields of the Swiss Alps and the splendour of an Alpine summer beckoned, with its calming promise. I walked for endless hours through forests and streets in villages, assimilating every bit of it on an unplanned path. I climbed endless hills and wandered down valleys festooned with cows and the sound of their bells. I couldn’t get enough of the fresh Alpine air and crisp sunny days, and with every breath my mind seemed more clear and a future in Sense more certain.
Passing endless homesteads and hills, without any specific direction or place in mind, I hungrily stumbled into an Alpine village with its typical tranquil antiquity. The name Appenzell appeared in more than one window as I entered the doorway of a facility serving food. An interesting and charming fact about Europe is that within about 20 km from a major city, a village such as Appenzell can exist, where some people don’t speak any English and the menus are in the local language only. I at the time had no idea what I was ordering besides the beer and kalbs leber. I finished the enjoyable dish although anxiously realising it was the metabolic centre (liver) of a small bovine. Besides the compacted stratification of contrasting cultures on offer in Europe, I started feeling at home and more in touch with the philosophical minds of a bygone era. Europe was all I expected and more and I could sense the presence and the struggles of our ancestors in search of sense here.
To sense the splendour of ancient Europe as experienced by the great composers, philosophers, scientists, and artists, who all assisted in the expansion of sense, is relatively easy while travelling with a mind receptive to this sense. Like so many of the great art museums of Europe, the Vienna Art History Museum never fails to impress. One can’t help however, aesthetics aside, see the objective cruelty created by the segregation of religions and power hungry churches and nations at the time based on the beheadings and crucifixions in much of the art. Yet underneath all this was a distinct sense of reaching out for some more deific ‘secret’. Religion domineered as the artists reigning motive but a sense and feeling of a struggle towards something beyond this, much deeper and more complex, is evident in many of these masterpieces.
Schelling's Ages of the World, written in 1809 in Stuttgart, begins with the On the Essence of Human Freedom (FS = Freiheitsschrift).
Schelling’s philosophy is an attempt to explain the emergence of an intelligible world at the same time as coming to terms with the mind's inextricable relation to object. The aim of the move away from Spinoza’s rationalism and Kant’s fluctuating realism and scepticism is to avoid the sense of a material world complete in itself (based on object), which would render sensory freedom illusory because sensory limits would already be in place as part of the totality. The idealist aim of systematically, unifying subject and object by comprehending the objective development of history, is confronted by the lack of scope for philosophical opinion and do not allow for solutions (the possibility of this book). The concerns expressed by Schelling are a welcome move away from the, albeit sobering constraints set by Kant. Furthermore, the structures Schelling develops lead to ideas, which take us beyond idealism and make his ideas crucial precursors of existential and other non-idealist forms of modern philosophy.
What are we (I) all looking for? Obviously, an easy ambiguous and utilitarian leaning (as discussed) answer is happiness. Happiness is a subjective and relative term mostly encountered in fleeting spasms in-between life’s daily somewhat repetitive challenges. I pondered and mentally listed the actions that could bring happiness as I wandered through the Swiss Alps.
Besides our initial basic needs for food, water, and shelter (the supply of these basic commodities will provide a sense of happiness) there is sexual fulfilment, companionship (family and friends), and recognition. Recognition is the one most of us unknowingly struggle for, once we’ve overcome our fears and satisfied our basic needs of food, water, shelter, companionship and sex. We want recognition for our wisdom, achievements, wealth, or good looks etc. ‘Nevertheless’, asks the philosopher in us, ‘why’? ‘Is it simply to exhibit to the world what a good bet you are for seeding DNA and looking after progeny’? proposes the natural scientist. ‘Should the birth control you or your partner are using fail’? adds the utilitarian great lover.
Assume you have satisfied all your basic needs (you have the fancy home, car, and recognition as a great lover). Now what?
You obtain two PhDs and as captain of the football team the girls sigh when you walk by, while the guys nod in respect and admiration. What next?
Vanity aside and if, like most people, you suggested, ‘To help others and save the world,’ you are correct, and possibly stated this with a bit more broadness of vision than the utterings of finalists at a beauty competition.
As seen in our researcher, the glory and the true sense of the cure for cancer lies in the contribution to all of humankind. All the other life goals have survivalist origins and as such, most aspects in their pursuit have surpassed their evolutionary use-by date. Alternatively, they are egotistic in origin and this, in the context of things, can only be seen as plain ignorance. A simple question to ask is: who is the best man for the job, the one who does it with love and compassion for others or the one who does it for a few bob to buy stuff for him or herself and self-glorification? This drive for recognition and group acceptance goes beyond increased survival odds for the individual or the group, it calls out for communication and the comfort found in peaceful interaction in anticipation of expanding sense. In a global climate without poverty, are we not more inclined to go this way?
In this context if the intention of global reform is to enhance ‘non-utilitarian’ only-based human gratification and indirectly wellbeing, then macro-level political action ought to be directed towards increasing the egalitarian nature of appropriate microenvironments in which the egalitarian instincts can best be extended globally. Enrich our environments, help and care for one another across boundaries—almost back to basic biblical realities.
Large-scale action (such as peaceful political revolution, change or even abolishment of government, and legal or fiscal reform) undertaken to adjust the impact of existing abstract inequality in the interests of 'social justice', is then justified. The purposeless ‘senseless’ mind will live from one brief moment of happiness (relative) and self-gratification to the next, with vast expanses of meaningless struggling and unhappiness in between, regardless of status, with no more to offer sense than self-gratification. Such minds cannot be in control of our global sense.
Even if correction of this Darwinian approach to life and social reform calls for sensible drug or genetic manipulation, like the enlightenment of the cancer researcher, so be it. Also then, criticize sense for curing mental disease and cancer one day.
In order to investigate organic life's chances of drug-induced sensory enhancement, we must go way back to the 1950s, to find again proof of how non-objective chance events change our sensory advancement. The unsuspected guinea pigs were veterans at a U.S. tuberculosis sanatorium. Doctors in those days prescribed the monoamine oxidase-inhibiting drug (MAO) known as iproniazid as a treatment for tuberculosis. After a few weeks of treatment, however, many of the patients started to feel exceptionally happy. Doctors described their patients, perhaps over-enthusiastically, as ‘dancing in the aisles’. Their euphoria couldn’t be explained by a simple and understandable reaction to restored good health.
Medical researchers subsequently discovered that MAO inhibitors as a class can induce a benign, long-term re-regulation of several families of nerve cell receptor proteins involved in making us happy or sad. Quite by accident, modern medicine had stumbled on the sustainable mood-lifting properties of a remarkable and diverse category of drugs, the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. This principle is the key to modern day antidepressants known as serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and was the first real meaningful drug intervention in the search for improved wellness of sense.
Monoamine oxidase or MAO (the enzyme these drugs inhibit) consists of two main types, unimpressively labelled A and B. MAO is an enzyme responsible for the deamination (breaks them down) of monoamine neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin, the emotional ‘happy’ brain chemicals. Thus by inhibiting MAO’s breakdown we can accumulate these happy brain chemicals. It also deaminates trace amines such as phenylethylamine, found in chocolate or released when one is in love as is often romanticised in media hype. MAO isoenzyme-A deaminates serotonin, norepinephrine and, to a lesser extent, dopamine. Isoenzyme-B breaks down dopamine and phenyl ethylamine. The action of monoamine neurotransmitters on the post-synaptic receptors and the intracellular cascade they induce play a vital role in mediating mood and emotion. Depletion of monoamines in the synaptic vesicles (lack of communication), such as by the anti-hypertensive drug reserpine, can sometimes precipitate severe and even life-threatening depression. Elevated levels of the brain chemical dopamine, on the other hand, are associated with euphoria. How easy it is to manipulate sense!
The MAO inhibitors then set the base of a distinct group of drugs, infamously known as (again due to media puffery) and unimaginatively referred to as ‘antidepressants’. Possibly the only significant advance in neuro-pharmacology, unfortunately some of today's standard licensed products, such as the tricyclic antidepressants, are in general unrewarding to people who are not clinically depressed or anxious. Their action also dulls, however mildly, the intellect and sensibility, thus counter to sensory advancement.
Most traditional euphorics, at least until the development of ‘newer’ selective serotonin re-uptake blockers such as fluoxetine (Prozac), sertraline (Zoloft), and others came along, should be considered as ‘unselective’ drugs with also little chance to assist sensory advancement. Besides, they have some bothersome side-effects. All of them however, thanks to the formalist, politically-influenced culture reigning in the medical establishment, have been tested and brought to the market with the deliberate aim to not induce too much of an euphoric sense of wellbeing. This is so in order to prevent abuse potential in the user. Alcohol, a depressant with abuse potential and responsible for much suffering and death (vehicle accidents, family breakdowns), however, seems to be readily available.
According to some pragmatic neurologists, some of the newer successors to these drugs may be able to alleviate the world's emotionally entrapped population from the senseless psycho-emotive ghetto where depression and anxiety reigns, further enhanced by our Darwinian past and drug and alcohol dependency. It brings to mind Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. Potent, long-acting mood brighteners in tablet (or drink) form, with no clinical sensory suppressant effects, may serve as a life-enriching aid until new gene therapies enable us to knock out the genetic pathologies of negative emotions altogether. This of course will come with free trial samples for all rapacious politicians and business individuals.
It should, however, promptly and more seriously, be added in view of the above that if any objective hope of swallowing little pills to cure humankind’s mental health issues exist, we should quickly put it aside. This would simply imply treating a disease (our objective fixation) with a disease (object pill).
Much more wisely, we should nurture sense through global education and health care, while we continue to seek the cure in restoring interconnectivity and function in the ‘normal’ brain. This can be done through various upcoming genetic, physiological and anatomical discoveries as mentioned before; and use pharmaceutical mood-lifters merely as a tool to enhance interconnectivity in sense.
In considering most psychiatric disorders as characteristic of primitive Darwinian life, innovative new treatments for all kinds of mental ailments may help rid us of our objective sensory entrapment. It is difficult to conceptualise the full extent of our entrapment and emotional malaise whilst blinded by a consumerist society constantly distracted and appeased by commercialism and advertising. This, when not stupefied by alcoholic beverages, street drugs, or television serials with plots bordering on the insane. Society tends to think wrongly of patients with mental ailments as genetically unfit and in general, in some circles at least, as evolutionary failures. There are self-protective defence and denial mechanisms, as well as a plain failure of our sensory advancement, at work here, causing a lot of unnecessary human suffering. All sentient beings need care in the context of sense.
We could, with sense sustained and objectivity somewhat suppressed, experience the liberating joy of post-Darwinian life. Alcohol and psychoactive drugs may become redundant and be seen as rather crude tools for suppression of sense. If this sounds like heaven on Earth, it is exactly that and pure wellbeing could potentially become a deep and natural assignment of everyday life for all creatures.
It is vital to realise that such a state of wellbeing is only possible by means of positive emotional expression as triggers of further enhancement of group togetherness__ living in sense. Once such a state of mental maturity and wellbeing is reached, happiness, albeit relative, would be based on a greed-free and altruistic society. For once, the interdependency of life would be realised, respected, and adhered to. This particular drive, would be inspired by an almost desperate sense of moral urgency and not by eager futuristic medical researchers, politicians, or technocrats. It is not hedonistic or egoistic or utilitarian; it is not absolutist either in its urge, but driven by sense evolving into something higher.
Reflecting on the quite agonising things that are happening to people like you, me, our loved ones, and fellow sentient beings (Dolly the sheep) right now, we can only rush forward with relish and embrace our future—and distance ourselves from our Darwinian discontent as soon as possible. Alcoholism, drug abuse, bankruptcies, corruption, the barbarism of abattoirs, and egoistical behaviour burden us all and thus should be a shared moral concern.
Once involved in senseless medico-legal and fiscal-political problems, which will always have us return to an objective base, we end up with a cyclic struggle between positive and negative emotions—the haves and the have-nots—that, albeit ‘natural’ in our current genomic entrapment, will hinder sensory evolution.
All these issues are important in discussion, but unfocused in addressing our urgent needs for sensory improvement. Serving purely as objective mental exercises, we need well-defined goals. If we wish to avoid self-destructive behaviour and to be released from our Darwinian past more urgently, in immediate ethical-terms we should involve ourselves with cross-species cruelty prevention and global equality. This would include poverty eradication, proper healthcare for all beings, pain abolition, and promotion of mental health of all creatures in sense.
Starting with our educational systems, we need to teach core values of unconditional love, respect, and assistance for each other—a state of global elated bliss, achieved only by the profane application of sense in achieving harmony and interconnection through positive emotive expression. Worldwide sensory wellbeing will not be achieved via the edifying dissertations of religion, politics, or the media, but by a change in humanity‘s outlook to boost group equality and togetherness and accepting each other’s weaknesses. Promoting globally equal education and health is equivalent to caring for our diseased pancreas in memory of Marley, not having euthanasia as an option. We are all organs of one universal body. Why not care for every organ like it was vital to this body?
It brings us back to medical interference to help achieve such a state. We have previously mentioned that mental health can be assessed as an ability to care for others and express love, hope, and commitment. If so, we may ask yet again: Should serious consideration not be given to a full-scale objective neurological modification of the meso-limbic dopamine system (as described), physiologically or genetically, which can then enhance wellbeing and positive emotive expression? The philosophical complexity of utilising ‘euphoric drugs’ to stimulate sensory wellbeing has been mentioned, but confronts us again with its objective trend and limits set by utilitarian needs in an objective world.
If we then partially condemn this objective approach as the solution and depend more on unaltered ‘natural’ (a very ambiguous term) acquired environmental stimuli as the future genetic determinants of our adaptive potential, how natural is this? We are then still inescapably committed to look upon our present genetically arrived-at state of ‘naturally’ obtained awareness of these matters and our ability to address these issues as our ‘naturally’ created responsibility.
Alternatively, this could imply that we do nothing and let ‘nature do its selection thing’ shifting the blame to our Darwinian roots. We can now, in anticipation of a few lucky ‘fit’ Prozac-swallowing creatures eventually mutating, (adapting to rising carbon dioxide levels to breathe and supply energy, also radiation resistant and immune-privileged) sit back and wait because eons from now and after mass destruction, sense will evolve again.
The central nervous system (not by chance) has tens of billions of cells, but only some thirty to forty thousand neurons are allocated to the meso-limbic centre (recently an article suggested the role of cells in the prefrontal cortex as also being involved in happiness), the origin of pleasure. Scaringly few neurons are assigned to directing the rest of the objective brain to happiness. There is good reason for this. Group-enhancing emotions will be difficult to express while overwhelmingly happy when somebody is crying out in pain. The neurons of the meso-limbic dopaminergic regions innervate the higher cortical centres of the brain and thereby help mediate the genetically adaptive encephalisation of emotions. This adaptation has served emotive and sensory evolution well in creating interconnectivity, as we have seen so far. However, it must be rescued from the now out-dated Darwinian entrapment in being left senseless in the hands of ‘natural’ selection as its sole objective guide to determine its destiny.
Emotional encephalisation is presently dependent on a consumerist society convincing its victims that happiness is inseparable from presence or absence of a Prada scarf or Stefano Ricci underpants and various other innervated types of objectification. In failing to meet such unrealistic relative criteria in our larger urban areas and elsewhere, the ‘losers’ reach out for primitive forms of mind-altering drugs, like alcohol and street drugs, with further damaging effects.
A regimen of sustained euphoria simply using ‘safe’ drugs that stimulate ’happy’ brain chemicals (like serotonin) in the synapses is an improvement, but unfortunately also, as we can see, is still not a solution to speed up sensory advancement. Certainly, more promising research on this front would be directed at understanding and potentially restoring the anatomical and interconnectivity breakdown in the brain. Such an approach in-line with restoring interconnectivity, albeit undeniably objective makes better ‘sense’. Drug induced excessive post-synaptic stimulation can, in fact, cause sensory malfunction and mentation not conducive to sensory and group wellbeing, like schizophrenia. A dopamine excess also marks the psychotic extremes of the ultimate egoist, individuals certainly not conducive to group wellbeing or popular at dinner parties. The sought-after effect is non-objective enhancement of togetherness and interdependency to achieve our ultimate advancement in sense. The emphasis should rather be on de-stratification of society and ultimate healthcare, mental wellness (for all species), and education for all through awareness of our combined goal.
The ultimate strategic objective to engineer happiness for every sentient being on the planet is certainly a noble one. Objectively driven, it is doomed to failure without addressing a sensory change. Surprisingly, we can achieve this serotonin and dopamine surge drug-free, with our minds flooded in the stuff when in purity of helpful thoughts and love for others.
All this may sound far-fetched and unobtainable, but then so originally did Dolly the sheep. Everything setting out to obtain group wellbeing and advancement of sense has a realistic chance to eventuate. So with ‘mother’s little helper’ as a standby, but much more importantly, a global mindset to improve dendritic interconnectivity in our advancement of sense, heaven, here we come!
The clean freshness in Switzerland was invigorating, yet as I ventured on through Austria towards Italy, I couldn’t help fighting back images of Africa. The affluence of most people around me was puzzling when seen in context of stern and often unhappy faces compared to the happy and mostly vibrant faces I had left behind in poverty-stricken Africa. A reining emptiness existed, insufficiently filled by a false promise that money might fill this non-existent void, but mostly it never did, leaving nothing but bitterness and regret.
As I walked through the streets in Vienna, I could only imagine a world where all the faces around me expressed a sense of fulfilment, togetherness, and concern for others—a world filled with happy faces and wellness in sense. Set in these surrounds of age-old magnificence and the aesthetic beauty of antiquity now unaffected by hopeless clinging to false aspirations of more money, sense will be where it is currently struggling to reach.
Chapter Eleven
LETTING GO
‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I experience and I understand’. Chinese Proverb
The flight from Hong Kong seemed endless. On the flight path display in front of me, I could see that we had just skimmed past the Gold Coast of Australia, bearing over the Great Barrier Reef en route to Auckland.
After years in Europe, I had returned to South Africa, only to find confusion, greed, violence, and crime to such an extent that it became sadly destructive and threatening to my fond memories and any new hope of returning to a land newly liberated from apartheid. I had to leave before my fragile faith in humanity disappeared again. The negative impact of apartheid’s evils lingered in those early post-democratic formative years, with stratification, fear, and greed still prevalent.
I left a few weeks after hearing news of the murder of a third person known to me as a client at our Johannesburg clinic. Mr Shapiro was in his late eighties when he died after an assault at his home. He had survived World War II Nazi concentration camps, the emotional upset of losing his wife after prolonged cancer, and many more of life’s miseries during his turbulent but full life. He became a regular and loyal client with his old dog and principle companion, which suffered from a chronic skin condition. Content, modest, and friendly, he often shared horrific tales from his wartime past with me as I went about examining and treating his dog.
With no relatives left in South Africa and most of his friends dead or elsewhere in the world, his remembrance consisted of a small entry in the newspaper under the deaths column and a small bleak funeral with only a few people (including me) in attendance. It was heartbreaking when his neighbour had presented the thirteen-year-old dog to our surgery for euthanasia a few days later. To find a home for a geriatric thirteen-year-old German Shepherd with a skin condition is nearly impossible in an objectively fixated society.
With Lisa now married to a doctor in Johannesburg, I was left lonely and depressed, and reached decisive low point in my life. Mr Shapiro’s death was the last straw, and after previous years of academic and social fulfilment, I now yet again left the tenebrific southern African Highveld on a cold midwinter day.
My attraction to and subsequent departure for New Zealand was an easy decision. David was a jovial Kiwi and vet friend that I had met working in England, and it was on his invitation and through ongoing correspondence that I secured a position as a small animal vet in Christchurch, New Zealand.
In my depressed state and under the sensory expatiation triggered by global migration, I couldn’t help but become cynical about objective life. Blinded by conformity and driven by greed or survivalist goals, we aimlessly continue on our daily paths in a state of mental dullness, completely ignorant to the suffering and pain caused by our stratified and extremist global society. Most individuals take the approach of anxiously accumulating wealth and insulating themselves from reality. To realise the responsibility that follows the privileged position of affluence is imperative for us to obtain sensory advancement. For those amongst us who are wealthy, happy, and secure, it is important to realise the enormous responsibility of such an honoured position. The privileged person should realise the millions of beings who have suffered through the ages of sensory evolution to carry a lucky few to their temporary and short-lived state of elevated wellbeing. To think in terms of achievement as a deserved personal greatness, or a fought-for survivalist reward and to egoistically enjoy this momentary excess, oblivious to the struggles of others, is strongly linked to our primitive Darwinian past and morally wrong. In turn, wealth in Sense is prosperity.
We should thrive on success, respectfully share it with fellow beings and constantly keep in mind that it was a universal life force that drove us to this point. However, albeit not evident, we should realise that it took centuries of sensory evolution to achieve this as part of a universal drive and that it rests heavily on the poor, at times tortured and suffering, individuals from past and present. Therefore, express modest joy and not arrogance in achievement; it is a universal and mass accomplishment.
I found the absence of extreme poverty or extreme wealth in New Zealand refreshing after the extremes experienced in Africa and other parts of the world. The unpretentious wooden cottage-style houses and the lush green meadows framed by ferns were all very pure and cleanly refreshing after the dust of Africa and the dense populace of Europe and Asia. En route to the South Island and during a stopover in Rotorua, while walking through its main street with the cold early winter mist and strong smell of sulphur in my nostrils, I felt like I was on another planet.
The trip by ferry across the Cook Strait to Picton on the South Island of New Zealand is a shaky expedition into desolation. However, a sense of freedom and hope enfolded me as I faced the vast island, inhabited by a lonely sounding 800,000 human souls at this remote tip of the world. There can at times be a sense of being in a time-void in New Zealand, although it is disappearing with the advent of modern day air travel, the Internet, and the modernisation of homes and workplaces. Christchurch is a typical mix of the new era New Zealand and the partly lost in time. The Cathedral and Hagley Park region in the town centre became my favourite spot. Scenic surrounding hills with views of snow-capped mountains and the Pacific Ocean became my fondest memories.
It’s difficult to see, in view of our quest and experience discussed so far, how some modern day thinkers can reject panpsychism with objective transitivity-based arguments and fail to see the interdependence of everything in a goal-directed sense. Maybe these individuals should spend more time staring at snow-capped mountains and experience the sense of belonging and the emotions that follow when doing so. The Southern Alps in the distance were real and present, and so was I, in the current moment, which was (and is) all that is.
I may have travelled far and experienced different things, but I was here now, and all else existed as a dream. I felt no different and was present in the moment, enveloped in sense. Every present moment of life, which leads to the next moment of our future, and any decision at that moment, is our only control over our destiny and our responsibility. Where we are now and our actions from here—therein lies our future. In this also remains our main responsibility—to spend every moment in sense. I realised as I got up from that park bench that the only control I have over my destiny is determined by what I do in the present moment resulting in the next. We should be completely absorbed in this presence and entrapment in sense. Do I go left right or straight? Had I gone left, would I have had a different outcome to my future? However, one can only choose one route, and that is our destiny. This applies to humankind in our delicate present situation. With such responsibility, how can we not take sense seriously? My destiny had been determined when I decided to accept the position in Christchurch.
In order to try to get over the problem in monism of how the one is also the many and how both Spinoza and Schelling hinted towards the mind being an idea of the body, one inescapably faces the reality of panpsychism, driven by evolution of sensory expansion. Schelling explains this ‘transitivity’ via the metaphor of the Earth:
‘You recognise its [the Earth's] true essence only in the link by which it eternally posits its unity as the multiplicity of its things and again posits this multiplicity as its unity. You also do not imagine that, apart from this infinity of things which are in it, there is another earth which is the unity of these things, rather the same which is the multiplicity is also unity, and what the unity is, is also the multiplicity, and this necessary and indissoluble One of unity and multiplicity in it is what you call its existence….Existence is the link of a being (Wesen) as One, with itself as a multiplicity. Thinking is not my thinking, and being is not my being, for everything is only of God or the totality’.
This, in essence, was Schelling’s big move away from the German idealist model in which the intelligibility of being is regarded as a result of its having an essentially mind-like structure. If every individual thinks only good and acts in a sense of goodness for the entirety and not the self, the world and all its atoms would be set for ultimate sensory advancement. Possibly achieving such sensory harmony throughout every atom in the universe is the ultimate goal of the designer or creator and a step closer to ultimate sense, or God?
The simplistic vision of a clear left or right decision is unfortunately not always possible, due to the enormous complexity of ‘distorted’ atoms and individuals we intermingle with daily. Almost all the decisions we make have a moral dimension in the sense that, one way or another, they ultimately affect the wellbeing of other people, animals, or objects around us. Even if the entropy theory could possibly hold true as an ultimate goal and clear vision interferes in an unnecessary way with our evolution towards this, or we consider ‘disturbance’ of the universal forces as a requirement for sensory advancement. We remain faced with decisions involving an outcome that could have either a negative or a positive impact on universal sensory advancement. The ultimate goal is to do what is morally right and will benefit the totality of the group (not merely in a survivalist state of mind) and speed up further sensory elevation—in sense, what else can we do? All we can do is focus on the ‘moment’ and make it positively work fairly and equally for all.
It should by now be clear that religious and moral correctness and juvenile threats about a heavenly or hellish afterlife have failed to set the standard as to what is right or wrong. The idea that a god (parental figure) exists that will forgive bad behaviour is particularly dualistic and open to endless debate, and may actually encourage bad behaviour. An undetected one-off bad deed, as an example, the CEO that gets away with embezzlement and still leaves with a few million dollars and a religious sense of forgiveness, may actually live the rest of his or her selfish life quite successfully as a wealthy Darwinian member of our society. However, the question remains, had such a CEO done everything in the best interest of its members, and even furthermore, in terms of how it would affect society outside its own realms (environmental impact)? Then such an individual can be judged as truly successful and a deserving member of society. Furthermore, recognition of global societal and sensory advancement as an ultimate goal, and the impact our actions may have on it, is not only more conducive to community wellbeing, but indirectly satisfying to the self. This certainly is much more substantial than religion or threatening objective laws as a moral guide. The whole idea, then, of punishment and reward is irrelevant when confronted by moral choices. The whole concept of what is right or wrong, the positive and negative that constantly faces us every minute of the day, is a weighty business that should never be based on ‘what can I get out of this‘, in virtue of the moment lies its own reward.
So it was then on that fortuitously enlightening day that I got up from the park bench in Hagley Park, Christchurch, shuffling through a thick covering of autumn leaves with the knowledge that decisions could be much easier and more vivid if approached with momentary actions in sense. To force sense in a preferred direction is also counter to the life force. Set goals in line with sense, pursue them, but don’t try too hard—just let sense happen.
It may seem over-simplistic to claim that a life based on this societal correctness in decision making will be easy and stress-free and also released from morality issues and restrictive laws (or, in fact, even possible). Clearly, it would, however, be a major improvement to our present Darwinian approach, living in a society where success is measured by material wealth and ‘what can I get out of it‘ at all costs. Most of this book was inspired by Marley’s euthanasia and a decision made on the park bench, culminating in a final decision to no longer live a lifestyle reflecting self-centred utilitarian Darwinist survivalist principles as sub-consciously directed by present day society.
I applied this basic decision-making principle, and since then my career as a vet and life as a result has benefited in all ways. I have albums full of thank-you cards, I’ve travelled all over the world and although not rich never lacked anything materially. I seem to encounter only sensible people and enjoy life. My destiny had been determined as I stepped forward into my future. I also experienced love, true love, and loss in all of its multiplicity.
I fell in love the minute I saw her, the nurse at the clinic of my first new position in Christchurch. She had a shapely, tall, lean athletic figure, with a pale, angelic face and a clear soft complexion, seen in the colder northern or southern parts of the world. Her blue eyes had a soft glow in a face rimmed by straight black hair. Nevertheless, it was not her outer beauty that attracted me, but an instant connection with her kindness and serene aura. With a simple local upbringing, public school, and local college education, she hadn’t seen much of the world outside New Zealand. Yet, she seemed to radiate the values and live the ideas that I had spent many hours searching for in my travels, readings, and debates. Her purity, innocence, and her ability to make urgent decisions so easily and wisely without any objective or philosophically complex analysis, made me realise that goodness has more than a strong genetic component behind it.
Her constant kindness and friendly expression made even the grumpiest of clients leave, if not with a smile, at least with a feeling of contentment. Albeit for her shapely figure, sex seemed a remote and distant motive in my pursuit to gain her friendship and recognition. I wanted to know all about her and talk to her about all and everything. I wanted to share my experiences and explore the world with her. I wanted to achieve wisdom, so natural to her, that to me came so hard.
We walked for miles along the hills on the outskirts of Christchurch. She told me about the local plants and places with an astounding knowledge for a girl without any university education. I told her all about the things I had done, places I had worked, my childhood, and my thoughts about life. She listened to me and shared ideas with such intent and open honesty that the bond between us grew stronger every moment we spent together, to a point where both felt that we had known each other from the day we were born. Life had never been so pure and meaningful.
We were both true and honest to ourselves and lived our lives and spent our time carefree and without any selfish hoarding of emotions or material things. With a constant need to share even silent moments together, we rented a small unit in the city centre close to Cathedral Square. Our companionship was innocent, pure, and without any embarrassment or possessiveness and filled with orgasmic bliss in just being. We attended string quartets in the Christchurch cathedral, had picnics in lush green fields, and read out aloud any meaningful sentence from books we shared. The meaning of life at its best!
We cycled along the hills around Christchurch and walked until we stumbled upon a new and previously undiscovered scenic spot, suited to have a meal and a glass of wine from our backpacks. At work, I excelled and did many surgeries that before I had felt insecure about doing unassisted. She assisted wisely and quietly through some stressful orthopaedic procedures. We both felt professionally satisfied at the end of a fulfilled working day. Life seemed complete in a fairy-tale world.
The first time she appeared faint was while assisting me with a routine sterilisation of a Labrador bitch. It often happens in the operating theatre and is simply due to skipping breakfast or a menstrual cycle.
However, as the weeks went by these asthenic episodes became more frequent. Pregnancy crossed my mind without concern or regret, albeit not timely in our path together. I think we both accepted that we would be together through life’s journey, at least until fate decided otherwise—and so it did.
I was waiting outside the doctor’s office on that sombre day. I remembered her mentioning the word leukaemia in her usual soft and kind tone while the rest of that first conversation became a blur in my memory. I recalled us walking away from the doctors’ rooms and wandering aimlessly and wordlessly without any cause or direction until it turned dark. We stumbled into the first accessible-looking restaurant, where we sat staring at each other, crying and holding hands openly without ordering, ignorant to the world around us. We eventually left without eating and only a mumbled apology to the bemused waiter.
If we face our lives making decisions based on societal and group wellbeing, concentred on sensorial development, how can we cope with loss and suffering without some level of egotistical anger or at least some sense of the cruel meaninglessness of existence? If a soul so pure and kind and filled with innocent young promise to deliver happiness to others is taken away prematurely while greedy egocentrics speed carelessly through sexual relationships and bars in sports cars, how can you remain committed to sense without anger?
I spent all my time with her towards the end. I read to her as much as I could and almost neurotically tried to cram in all of the readings and philosophical principles that had an impact on me. I described the places I had visualised us experiencing together in as much detail as I could muster, and she hungered to hear it from me. As she grew weaker, I took her for wheelchair walks to her favourite childhood spots along the Henley River. My life was shattered, yet her kind smile continued to bring joy to me and all who came to visit her. Her frail pale body couldn’t suppress her unaltered kindness and concern, for not only me but others as well. She faced her treatment, suffered quietly, and was more worried about my mental state and how I would cope when she was gone than about her own suffering. Wisely, she pointed out how my sadness and hopelessness was a self-centred possessiveness, exposed as contradictory to my doctrines. Exemplifying her perfect life in sense.
She remained positive until the end and died one bleak mid-July evening. Holding my hand gently, as if falling into a comfortable sleep with a pleasant dream, her serene-looking anaemic face enhanced by her thick black hair. I had to promise her on that last day that I would get over my self-centredness in seeing her death as a personal loss and remain focused in carrying forward sense with the responsibility bestowed on me.
Solitude, the fear of being persecuted, or grieving are emotions that are in no sense a Darwinian weakness or primitive evil, but an awakening to the realisation of being human with a social dependency on others. It is not an objective loss. One thing she mentioned before she died stands out. It summarised her simplistic clarity on complex philosophical issues and life, death, and immortality.
‘Life’, she said, ‘is like a jog on the beach towards the setting sun. Before you get to your destination the sun has set, but you go home happy, knowing the sun will come up again and, if not you, there will be another jogger, with a fresh new start on the beach tomorrow’.
I was alone and grieving. I could sense my grieving, however, failed this time to find any sense in my sense of grieve.
Kill the f***s. Why? September 11, murderers. It’s so easy to fight anger with anger and to forget the delicate fragile sphere of togetherness when we experience loss or see selfish, needles acts of evil in fellow human beings. The world was not created for one of us but all, past and yet to be born.
At first, the events of September 11 seemed like just another disastrous event that happened without affecting our immediate lives. My loss still fresh in my mind and my loneliness reaching a point of self-destructiveness, the mass murder of September 11 caused such emotional anger in me that I scared myself. What possible trust or faith can one have in fellow human beings and life—and do we fight anger and frustration with more anger?
Kant in his noble wisdom (sense) reminded us, that the path against negative emotions must be taken as just a tool in our travel across the land of morality. The end is to arrive at a peak called nirvana, but meanwhile we must stop on lower peaks that are going to announce to us the existence of that higher realm of existence.
‘I have purified my soul from all prejudices; I have destroyed every blind devotion which ever crept into my mind for the purpose of creating in me much imaginary knowledge. Now I esteem nothing as of consequence or worthy of respect except what honestly takes its place in a mind which is calm and accessible to all evidences, whether confirmative or destructive of my former opinions. Wherever I find anything that instructs me, I accept it. The verdict of the man who refutes my arguments is my verdict after I have weighed it against self-love and my reasons, and then have found its evidence the stronger. Formerly, I viewed the common human understanding only from the standpoint of my own; now I put myself in the place of a reason foreign to me and outside of me, and view my opinions, together with their most secret occasions, from the standpoint of others’.
The benevolence in Sense of Kant’s mind is reflected in the above ‘submissive’ extract from his works that helps one deal with emotions. With complete humble respect, I accept the fact that my at times criticism of his works would be deemed acceptable based on the noble thoughts expressed by the great mind as seen above, since we all have the same goal.
Thus to Kant also, one of the main purposes of morality is to work towards the happiness of others as ends in themselves, that is to say, humanity is never to be regarded merely as a means, but always as an end. Self-protectionism, as seen by the Bush invasion of Iraq based on untruths, simply cannot be seen as conducive to global or universal wellbeing or advancement of sensory development. Supplying education and healthcare would. It would, unfortunately in years to come, be seen as one of the emotional lows with the only benefit to make us look up and forward to nirvana beckoning, but seemingly more remote than before.
Happiness as an outcome of virtue is universal in its character. Kant in Sense understood this. The initial susceptibility comes from our mind, since we are spiritual beings endowed with flesh. That is, when our mind becomes susceptible to the inclination, it acts upon the body and its organs, giving rise to a potentially unhealthy physical state. But when our mind gives first priority to virtue, it predisposes the body (universal) towards health.
Chapter Twelve
There IS NO end
‘We travel for sake of travelling’. Dr Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara
Following my loss, I had to leave Christchurch to avoid this recent loss from ruining my life. I was certainly no saint and not enlightened enough to deal with my loss like martyrs form the past.
After a few weeks of travel in South Eastern Asia, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, I went to India, hoping and looking for spiritual support. Besides temporary distraction, I didn’t become more enlightened, even with the aid of numerous self-help and spiritual guides. They certainly expressed wisdom and acted as guides toward my future. However, my loss had been too severe and left me too deeply entrapped in my sorrow to experience detachment on such an enlightened level.
I ended up in Sydney, taking up a position as a practice manager, hoping to ‘lose’ myself in an excessive workload. I did all the after-hour work I could, booked surgeries to capacity, and hardly went anywhere. I became so obsessed with my work and caseload that I became annoyed and irritable if any case under my care was taken over by another vet. I mostly declined offers to go out and bluntly dismissed any assistance. My mental state became worse.
It was in this state of mind that Marley came into my life. I had seen many similar cases over the years and experienced many deaths and losses of my pet patients, yet Marley’s end revealed to me the secret about life and death. There is no end; there never will be one. Death is not cruel; it is not a Darwinian failure or a personal loss. For years, my objective scientific reasoning had prevented me from realising this rather simple fact. We are just a constant re-transformation of energy, gaining momentum in Sense with every ‘death’. This does not mean that in just ending a life the force has gained momentum. It simply means that life energy spent on the noble assistance and benefit of others and helping the advancement of sensory growth—in this lies the reward.
I have witnessed suffering and killing in South Africa, witnessed poverty through other parts of Africa, India and Asia, I have stayed in the Mumbai Taj Palace Hotel days before it was sieged, and I could sense the grieve suffered by people there. We can relate to the anger that drove people to such unforgivable acts of cruelty, but we can never condone such hurtful actions once the universal truth is discovered.
A life spent giving selflessly is a life with purpose, expanding sense. A life spent in greed and frustrated anger, taking more than giving, contracts sense. Every end is a new beginning. Just like our unanswered questions about the realms of the universe, extra-terrestrial life, and much more, our exiting future will reveal great understanding of how these things work. Let’s forget about immortality and concentrate on improvement of Sense and quality of life in the abundance around us.
All that is important for us to know in conclusion is that a life filled with kindness, love, and helping others will boost and recharge this energy cycle. The opposite is true of destructive and anger-filled lives. It is never too late to start educating the world as a whole about the togetherness and interconnectivity principle without any room for greed. Never fear the end. Give all the goodness you can to the end. Respect life. We’re all caught in its endless cycle. Love can indeed overcome death and suppression. We should detach ourselves from an objective world and develop our sense of greater love and kindness to others. There is NO other way.
Conclusion
Although the cruelty of Darwinism condemned throughout this book, rightfully so, in defence of sense it is appropriate for me to respectfully quote Charles Darwin (a great educator of mine in Sense) at the end of this manuscript.
“I often regretted that I have not done more direct good to my follow creatures. My sole and poor excuse is much ill-health and my mental constitution, which makes it extremely difficult for me to turn from one subject or occupation to another. I can imagine with high satisfaction giving up my whole time to philanthropy, but not a portion of it; though this would have been a far better line of conduct.”
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
As the plane approached the first visible brown outline of the African coast, it evoked a strong sense of excitement and contentment in me.
Next to me was seated my new friend, whom I had met during my aimless wanderings after my loss. Her Chinese cultures and values were as new to me as my Western values were to her, yet our bond was immediate as we found we were both involved in the ongoing pursuit of sense.
It is believed, in some Eastern cultures, that we only inhabit a travelling soul from one incarnation to the next. Our present soul is only one part of another, dancing with souls in the universe, at times shared by others.
On my way back from Shanghai before going to Africa I knew my new home was in sense, with no international, cultural, or any other forms of inequality in this yet imperfect and at times angry and still-stratified world. I also had the support of living in sense. We are all the same.
As we flew over the vast Mozambique plains, I was aware of the poor communities below, where AIDS and malaria-affected families with parasite-infected livestock struggled to survive. Slowly, all were awaking to bravely face a new day with smiles and hope in search of sense. I had come back to make, if possible, a small difference. Not only as a vestigial repairer of the infirm but to live in and spread Sense. All it takes, wherever we are, is a small act of kindness, a smile, or caring for someone or something with sincere compassion. This can make a world of difference.
Any action in sense to the benefit of others will inevitably result in success. In delivering a service or creating a product catering for the genuine, need of others we already succeed. If the company, business, or individual employs high ethics and morals in doing this with the pure motive to benefit the whole, the workers, the company, the people and the world win. Any other self-centred alternative may possibly be a short-term win but inevitably a universal loss. Refuse to work for or under companies, structures and management that do not act in this sense. From the moment, you put this book down, do things in unequivocal sense, taken moment by moment and to the benefit of others this will make the world a better place and sense WILL advance. I beckon all professionals and people from all occupations and walks of life not already in sense to drop egocentric greed immediately, respect one another, cross boundaries and start acting with genuine concern for the whole. That is our reason for being and journey to fulfilment in sense that is happening in an immensely sensible gene.
We evolved the wondrous ability to sense and perceive, to draw together… not to split apart and segregate.
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