Understanding our own nature is the key to everything
Question from the Internet:
“What is the deepest principle in human nature? Everybody likes compliments, a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger which project the desire for a feeling of importance.”
The deepest principle of human nature is that we are all driven by an insatiable, irrepressible desire for existence, a desire, a need for constant fulfillment for our ever-renewing and ever-growing yearning for pleasures, this constant desire and need is our sense of life.
We are not aware of this desire since it is our default state, but in each and every moment some new need to escape an uncomfortable or outright painful state, a new interest towards, greater, inviting pleasure makes us exist and move. When we lose any need or desire to make any efforts we become “lifeless”, depressed and we die. Life is constantly having some new goal, purpose ahead of us which is either moving away from unpleasant, painful states or moving towards greater, increasing pleasures, better states.
If we understood this basic principle — that we are basically like a “black hole” that constantly attracts the whole reality towards itself according to a 100% subjective, egocentric pleasure/pain calculation, then we could also easier find solutions to our ever-growing problems.
The root problem of humanity is that billions of “black holes”, each blindly attracting pleasures towards itself while also blindly fighting any unpleasant situations inevitably put us on a collision course with each other, especially since we have evolved into a fully, mutually integrated and interdependent world.
While on one hand, our instincts force us to continue acting as we have always been, through 100% subjective, egocentric calculations, in this global, integral system we inevitably survive and succeed at each other’s expense since we do not even feel or understand what others need or want. We just want to continue to take everything we think we need, constantly accumulating everything excessively only for ourselves way beyond our necessities — and we do not even know what our true necessities are.
We cannot suppress, erase our driving force, the “personal black hole” constantly drawing pleasures and resources towards ourselves. But we can learn how to refine, tune this personal fulfillment, we can learn how to adjust our egocentric, subjective pleasure/pain calculations in a way that humanity as a whole achieves and remains in balance.
We can purposefully, methodically learn how to achieve the same, fragile balance and homeostasis in humanity that exists everywhere else in Nature. We can learn how to build human societies where each and everyone finds their most optimal, mutually responsible and mutually complementing “cogwheel” role according to our inherent abilities and actual conditions — while each justly, proportionately receiving everything one needs and deserves for constantly maintaining that crucial, irreplaceable, mutually contributing role towards the whole.
By this, we become similar to and compatible with Nature’s integral system. Through this similarity, compatibility we also understand our role in Nature and we also viscerally feel and naturally accept what our true necessities and the available resources are. And all through this process — which starts with understanding the basic principle of our nature — we will achieve our very high, unparalleled role in Nature’s system: to become the whole system’s only fully conscious, integrated and at the same time independent observers and partners.