Who do we think we are?

“What a piece of work is a man, How noble in
Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals.”

William Shakespeare —The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene ii, 285-300)

 

Who do we think we are? A particularly destructive species of animals or the pinnacle evolution, maybe even the image of the divine? What do we feel we are? Where do we fit between the beasts and the angels? Today, as perhaps no other time in history have people as a culture and as individuals been faced with an identity crisis of such depth and angst.

Traditional churches, once the center of our communities, a place of the rituals and shared mythos conducive to a common moral sensibility, are empty – victims of their insistence on the literal truth of their own myths. But the while victory of science over superstition may be celebrated – the church’s role of binding a people together has been replaced – with nothing.

At the beginning of the 21th century emptiness, an absence of “meaning” is the common condition of our lives. Those who can, do well to seek understanding on the therapists’ couch, others turn to drugs or seek to numb the mind through entertainments that dazzle the senses. Sexual and violent images have become ubiquitous, stroking our reptilian impulses but doing little to refresh our spirits.

We have come far as a species and learned much. It is time to re-examine the question of human nature and come to a new understanding of what we are.  The elusive “meaning of life” for us as human beings, animals that are yet more than animals, is there to find, it is within our reach.

It will not be found in some new religious dogma or metaphysical speculation nor will it be revealed through art by itself and while empirical science is the key to our intellectual understanding of nature, our own included, it will never be sufficient because the meaning we seek is not only meaning in the sense of understanding but one of subjective experience.

While I find common ground with the skeptics who believe it is time for humanity to outgrow superstition and religious dogma I also believe that an essential part of our common human nature thinks not in intellectual but in mythopoeic terms, that we have in fact two highly evolved psychological subsystems both processing reality but in very different ways. I call these the Sapient and Sentient minds.  The full meaning of life, meaning as in understanding and meaning as in experience requires that we learn to use both.

Thus when I use the word spiritual to describe certain subjective experiences as I have become accustomed, I refer to a phenomena that undeniably exists in human experience. The skeptic will understand these as psychological, a phenomena of the human brain. People who believe that God, gods or other spiritual beings have a literal existence may understand what I call the sentient mind as a kind of metaphysical transceiver by which we apprehend them. What matters is that they are the same experiences and are essential to our common humanity.