Falling Into A Chemical Trap

While everyone is rushing off to master the latest science about our miraculous human brain, I might take a right turn and follow the ethologists for a bit.

Is it just a coincidence that one of our finest advocates - Noble prizing-winning scientist Nikko Tinbergen - was himself an ethologist?

Why my sudden fascination?

Losing a lover as a partner in life has highlighted for me how much of an animal I am. I mean that in a clinical, not derogatory sense. I am a mammal, and so are you.

Indeed, it is fascinating that - in a cultural context - calling someone "an animal" is considered derogatory. Why is it derogatory?

The curiosity of the zoologist is being born within me.

My interest started with unbridled emotion - deep, painful, beyond the pale. I also observed that it's inherent nature resembled - almost identically - the emotional storm I experienced on separating from my wife of 10 years.

What's this?! Recycled tragedy? I got suspicious…

My logic was a spray facing up to a tsunami of evolutionary emotion.

In the past I'd say 'this is my story' but the experience - my experience - is too species-common to put down to just my personal idiosyncrasies. Homo sapiens the world over write endless songs, poems, novels, plays, music, folklore on the tragedy of love, for it to be only about YOU individually.

It dawned upon me that it was not ME I was dealing with - the identity of "Jeremy" as I regularly frame it - it was ME: a homo sapien, a member of the Primates, a biologically programmed product of millions of years…

Living under the pretence of free will.

And again by happenstance - TODAY! - one of my favourite bloggers - Richard Koch - chimed in with a bit of neuroscience (can't avoid it) on the subject. He quoted David Eagleman, Professor of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, Houston…

"…most of what we think and do is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you - the "I" that flickers to life when you wake up - is the smallest bit of what's transpiring in your brain."

Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot…"

That makes it pretty clear - if I buy into Eagleman's metaphor - that the emotional roller coaster I experienced recently was not something I had ANY control over. Or that I even designed…

I fell into a chemical trap, set up by evolutionary pressures spanning millions of years.

So where does that leave conscious, constructive guidance of the individual? Where does that leave spiritual practise, meditation and self-development?

GOOD QUESTION, and one I will tackle tomorrow.

It does involve the Change Compass, so register your name to get in line for a special introductory offer on the series in which I map of Alexander's story in relation to the Change Compass in…

ThinkingBody Online.