Celebrate that you know what you know! Celebrate that you clearly see the difference between your behaviors and behaviors that you may decide are more beneficial.
Q : Thanks for reminding me. You keep making this point. We really are a very young species. Perhaps we should drive that point home in specific terms, so it can become real in people’s minds.
A lot of folks like to think of humans as highly evolved. In fact, humanity has just emerged from its infancy on this planet. In their book, New World New Mind, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich placed this in perspective in one mind-boggling paragraph:
“Suppose Earth’s history were charted on a single year’s calendar, with midnight January 1 representing the origin of the Earth and midnight December 31 the present. Then each day of Earth’s ‘year’ would represent 12 million years of actual history.
On that scale, the first form of life, a simple bacterium, would arise sometime in February. More complex life-forms, however, come much later; the first fishes appear around November 20. The dinosaurs arrive around December 10 and disappear on Christmas Day.
The first of our ancestors recognizable as human would not show up until the afternoon of December 31. Homo sapiens—our species—would emerge at around 11:45 p.m . . . and all that has happened in recorded history would occur in the final minute of the year.”
A : That puts things into perspective beautifully. And it creates a context within which it can now be understood why, in human societies, most people deny much of what they see. They even deny their personal feelings, and, eventually, their own truth.