Have you ever had the opportunity to observe chickens interacting with each other? Roosters are beautiful, goofy little people who walk around with their heads held high and their chests puffed out. Their whole job in life, it seems, is to have sex and protect hens. Pimping, in other words. But, to the human eye, their sex looks more like rape, and their protection ends when they get scared, for they are the first to run away, abandoning their family of hens and chicks. Pimps, in other words.
If they were human people we could easily diagnose chicken behavior: roosters mask their masculine insecurity through bravado, and hens are either victims of a rape culture or tend to play the victim of rape culture. Jury’s still out on that. Observing all of this barnyard behavior, one is struck by a question: Do the limitations we put on ourselves through oppression and repression have animal origins?
One wonders if what is good for the chicken is taboo for the human because greater freedom in consciousness contains an ability to interpret physical drives instead of identifying as them. Further, one wonders, is it possible that because physical drives are the baseline of us, a tendency to continue to identify as them, despite our freedom not to, is the simplest way to be? Is it easiest to be physical-centric in a physical world because that’s the most obvious way to self-identify?
When our fellow citizens act like degenerates, we call them filthy animals. Maybe we’re admitting to ourselves something about all of us there. Except animals aren’t filthy and their behavior is perfectly fine for them. What makes it not perfectly fine for us? What makes animal behavior so profane for us that even our depictions of evil incarnate, of demons and devils, are animalistic?
Could the demonization of the animal in us be our unconscious way of telling ourselves that we need to move on because, although we have the ability to do so, it is a choice?
It is as if the baseline of our physical nature is a tractor beam constantly pulling us into itself and so our choice not to be that is also a constant choice. We’re choosing to pull away. It’s exercise, not easy. It’s a struggle against the roots of our very nature. We’re like animated trees stepping out of our plot and walking away, thinking the plot was the thing we were escaping, when our roots wanting to be rooted is the issue. When one of us stops walking, such a one’s roots take hold in the earth and we say they are failures as trees—I mean humans.
Is there a way to properly integrate our animal nature with whatever this further freedom is in a lasting way? There is not, if the freedom is expressed as running. But perhaps if we were expressing as Being, something altogether different would take root.
When we’re Being, we’re not running. When we’re Being there is no confusion. Proper integration happens, not the flailing between different modes of behavior, lashing out as “animals” and acting reserved as “mature adults.” There is in Being a uniformity that is not put together by thought, by conformity or anarchy. This creates its own discipline and the various natures within us become tools within the disciplined mind.
Perhaps, in the final assessment, the reason human nature eludes us so is because the state of consciousness we find ourselves running the treadmill upon is being treated as a stage. The final stage. The one we must make sense of, must figure out, must master. Must do something with and do something about. Must judge all other states and stages as inferior from to uphold our status as the finality of it all.
Meanwhile, in us, through us, all around us is Being. Being has no hierarchy. Being has no beginning and no ending. Being cannot be chosen or chosen away from. Being is. One aspect of Being is its own self-identity. Two other aspects of Being are your and my self-identities. Yet another aspect of Being is our ability to understand this so deeply that our identities lose their stranglehold and Being’s self-identity becomes the case of us the way we became the case of the animal. Except unlike that, Being was, is, and always with be the case of us because we are aspects of Being.
What is Being in the final assessment? True and total freedom. How do we “get there”? We cannot, for any action is our doing within Being, not our being Being. There is no choice in being Being. No non-choice. There is only the choiceless choice, which is made not by you but by the brain, when it understands this so thoroughly that even the defenses of the animal eyes reading this, and the person trying desperately to make sense of the words in a way that enriches their existence, fall.