the human group - session 76 - human animal

This week’s exploration of ‘human animal’ was slow, exciting, deep and hilarious as we navigated scales of existence, sense-making and truth. These collective discussions maintain a connection to each other and nature itself.

What is your human animal? How do you spot it?

I see it picking its nose, scratching its bum, indulging in shadow expressions; road-rage, sports-rage, pet-rage, I experience it when I am naked making love in a way that is driven by sensation and sensuality, this can be soft, slow and hard, vicious and fast. I spot my animal when my mind is overwhelmed and knowledge no longer serves me.

The natural environment tempts my animal out like a siren singing me towards a chaotic demise of identity. Death of a reputation as I throw my clothes off and run wild.

Some fear the mongrel within. Mind’s fretting as to what the world will look like if everyone is let loose.

So we discipline its movements, lock it up and keep it in a shadowy cage.

What if we respect it?

Secretly I wish to fully embody my animal and do away with the pretence of past-knowledge layered over my being like a static entity between me and reality.

I am still wild, the world is still wild, but perhaps we just trick ourselves, deceive ourselves with a delusion of total control.

What is your animal?

We discussed in a dualistic way at first; there is our animal and then there is the human. Both stories of course, serving us each in a sense making context. The animal is all that we reject of our human disposition; the disgust, chaos, death, blood, shit, tears, mystery and magic: the shadow. The human is our conscience, built via a context of dollhouses, parenting, social conditioning, education and the story of society, the story of progress; basically a matrix of story removing us from the discomforts of our animal ancestry still present in our everyday lives.

From this point of interest we followed the line of discussion between the etiquette of humanness and the anxiety, mental illness and dissatisfaction in life it seems to cause when imbalanced. We spoke of the difficulty of navigating through socially accepted norms and masks to have a mutually beneficial interaction that feels less like a costumed play and more like a real-time exploration of the relationship.

What if, instead of shaking hands, introducing ourselves via an identity, we circled each other, freely looked each other up and down, touched, gently exploring boundaries, smelt each other before we used the barely satisfactory tool of the spoken word?

One human mentioned play as a way to interact with the essence of another. Maybe we keep a ball in our pocket just in case we meet someone new and wish to disperse the anxiety promoted by one-dimensional judgement. I wish to have an interaction with your being-ness, not a ted-talk of your constructed identity, it bores me and the last guy I spoke to said the same trending thing.

We are curious creatures. Proud in our delusional existence created by our over valued intellect, our poor story creation and ignorance of our inherent nature. A tragic comedy of stumbling errors within an intelligent environment that giggles at us like a loving parent who humbly laughs at its child learning to walk.

We are not the stewards of nature, but the teenagers of it, aggressively ignoring and separating ourselves only to discover that our elders, our environment spans an existence of experience beyond our young ignorant, playfully serious years.

We are yet to ask for the wisdom our nature holds patiently for us. We are yet to listen to our patient elders, too busy playing doll houses, cowboys and make-believe with poor incentives.

Another scale the conversation adopted took us to the perspective that all is animal. We are animal in the construction of our delusions, we are naturally evolving through this path of obsessive convenience, urbanisation, mask-wearing, social etiquette, environmental devastation, monetary delusion. Separating from our parents to self-actualise, individuate and grow.

Some say that the present era we find ourselves is the universe becoming aware of itself. Maybe we are becoming aware of ourselves. With the objectivity the separation facilitates we can now see that we somehow have an integral role within the ecosystem. As teenagers we have enlightened the fire of the will and it has taken us far from home and dealt us difficult lessons, our restlessness exhausted as we use that same crafted will to carry us back home to the garden.

What does this new evolution of our animal look like? Collaborating with our elders, advancing the technologies of relationship rather than separation. What does this fantastical world have yet to reveal to us in this next chapter of this great adventure?