From Symbolic Consciousness To Insight Consciousness

“Over three billion years after life established itself on Earth, we, alone among millions of descendents of our ancient common ancestor, somehow acquired not just a large brain – the Neanderthals had that – but a fully developed mind.”

Ian Tattersall, Paleoanthropologist

Do we humans have “a fully developed mind,” or are contradictions woven into the very fabric of our brain’s evolution “from which we shall never be freed?”

In an age of both global homogenization and intractable differences on the individual and collective level, it’s worth considering a basic fact. The disparities between the Stone Age Magdalenians 20,000 years ago that painted the frescoes of Lascaux that rival the greatest paintings of the Renaissance, and the first agriculturalists and city-builders over 7000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and we struggling humans in the Digital Age, are superficial.

Indeed, the human mind is not progressing but regressing, as our diminishing attention spans indicate; as young people’s widespread resignation confirms; and as imminent AI cognitive superiority threatens.

So it isn’t just that “fully modern humans” have not essentially changed since Homo sapiens sapiens emerged in Africa and displaced our cousin species, Homo sapiens neanderthalis around 40,000 years ago.

It’s that symbolic consciousness – the mind fed on words, images, memories and information, is saturated, and the cumulative past and present is suffocating us all.

The problem isn’t “the polarization of two tribes shouting past each other on social media.” The problem is man’s primitive tribalism exacerbated by the externalization of collective consciousness. The Net is human consciousness, and social media merely reflects and aggravates the long-neglected underlying darkness at the nexus between the individual and consciousness as a whole.

The mind requires space and stillness to grow, but we’ve produced a global society that destroys space and generates only noise.

There is no such thing as psychological evolution and “enlargement.” Growth occurs through negation, not addition; through deepening insight, not widening knowledge; through ending the separate self, not venerating the “me” as the center of all that be.

Inwardly and intellectually, humans are regressing in direct proportion to man’s decimation of the Earth. In recent years, in keeping with desperate attempts to deny the chasm between humans and the rest of nature, there’s been an attempt to erase the significant cognitive difference between Neanderthals and us.

Paradoxically, Neanderthals had larger brains than us, but they lacked vocal tracts enabling complex speech, and therefore language and symbolic thought. Fully modern humans out-competed, annihilated and interbred with them (probably in that order).

However, just because Neanderthals weren’t our intellectual equals does not make Homo sapiens superior to them. Neanderthals had a tremendously successful adaptive strategy based on observation, imitation and intuition that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.

Intuition is a very different thing than insight however, and Homo sapiens possesses a tremendous latent capacity for insight (though it has only been applied outwardly, with skills, science and technology). Can an explosion of insight occur that fully awakens this latent capacity in the human brain? Can human beings make the quantum leap from symbol-based consciousness to insight-based consciousness?

As Tattersall understatedly writes, “Great though may be the leap we have made from the rest of the living world in the acquisition of symbolic thought, we have not entirely emancipated ourselves from the brain structures that governed the behavior of some very remote ancestors.” But it isn’t the “brains structures” that we must free ourselves from, but “our symbol-manipulating brains that underpin our vaunted consciousness.”

A radical shift in consciousness has temporarily or permanently occurred in people of all cultures over the millennia. It proves that a higher consciousness is possible. The difference now is that transcending the old consciousness of man has become vital to the survival and harmony of humanity on this extraordinarily beautiful planet.

In northern California, where we’ve seen entire towns and hundreds of thousands of acres engulfed by man’s climate disordering wildfires, we woke to a cloudless morning of cobalt skies as large parts of Los Angeles is being incinerated. All suffering is global; all self-centeredness is local.

Leave the colonization of lifeless Mars to the haters of the Earth and Humanity. However long it takes to change the course of man, they will not prevail.

Given what man is doing to the Earth and to humanity, if a higher consciousness than symbol-based consciousness is possible, then a higher consciousness is imperative. Freeing oneself from conditioning, tradition and failing institutions, the individual that makes awakening insight the most important thing is the foundation and fountainhead for a true civilization.

Just as no person can receive an insight unless she is ready for it however, the dead, darkness-saturated consciousness of man cannot ignite until enough human beings are igniting insight within themselves.

However limited their symbolic capability, there is strong evidence that Neanderthals had an awareness of death, and deeply felt the loss of a loved one. But as Tattersall says, “Death remains an abstraction for each of us,” kept at arm’s length until the end by symbolic consciousness.

Clearly, a “fully developed mind” does not separate death from life, but transcends death by emotionally perceiving its inextricability from life, and as the infinite ground from which the universe and all life continuously arise.

Making a friend of death renews and transmutes the brain, expands the mind, and opens the door to true immortality.

Via negativa is a difficult path, but it is the only way ahead for the individual as far as I can see. In the complete negation of everything one knows and everything one has experienced, one comes into direct contact with the actuality of death. Whether temporary or irrevocable, that is the continuously re-poured foundation for an ever-growing human being.

No computer, however complex it may become in a simulacrum of sentience, will ever be able to approach the state of silence and insight, and communion with death and love that is the birthright of the human being.

Exaptation refers to the process by which evolution utilizes an existing feature or structure in a new and different way than its original function. Birds’ feathers are the quintessential example. Feathers evolved in the dinosaur ancestors of birds for temperature regulation, and were later exapted for flight.

With the negation and complete stillness of symbolic consciousness of “higher thought,” based on words, images, memories and associations, the human brain is exapted for insight. And insight, when it flowers within, enables the human being to take flight.

Martin LeFevre

lefevremartin77@gmail

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