Divine Primate: A Journey Towards Sustainable Cultures

by Earon S. Davis, JD, MPH, NCTMB 

I have been thinking about how to call upon our ancient wisdom traditions to encourage our cultures to be more sustainable.  Most of these traditions seek balance between body, mind and spirit in order to create inner harmony and outer peace.  Very often, these traditions focused on the individual, on bringing mind, body and spirit into awareness and connection in order to create inner peace and wellness.  Indeed, this is something that we have the power to do in our lives, while focusing on other people often brings us conflict and turmoil.

Yet, we do not withdraw from our families, communities and nations in order to focus just on ourselves.  We are inextricably inter-twined with the world around us, so with our in-breath we focus on inner peace and with our outbreath, we focus on bringing peace to the rest of the world.
All to often, we fail to see the full breath of spirituality.  It is important to find tranquility when the world is in danger and turmoil, but with the in-breath there must be an out-breath.

So it is that sustainability requires self-care that maintains a healthy balance between individual and community, between humans and the natural world.  We can not achieve this simply by cultivating our own tranquility any more than we can by satisfying our own greed.  Integrating body, mind, spirit, emotion, community and nature is the larger goal.  We must not accept the current sense of human beings as a population of individuals disconnected from each other and from the natural world.   This simply does not work.
 
"Divine Primates," my book project, is a call for the global re-integration of body, mind, spirit, emotion and community.  Our current cultures divide the world up in ways that prevent us from relating to our fellow humans and to nature in ways that are sustainable.  Mind has been elevated at the expense of body, spirit, emotion and community.  Instead, our cultures need to make a large shift from honing the skills to manipulate and exploit nature and mankind to focusing more on the skills to live within the constraints of economy, nature and geopolitics.  These can all be gradually accomplished, but not without new cultural images and values that celebrate humanity and human nature as part of the natural world rather than as perfectable beings destined to live as gods.  Nature does not allow for the survival of any species that refuses to adapt to change, us included.

It is one thing to bring back functioning spiritual systems into our lives.  But, at the same time, we must reconnect our minds and bodies with our emotions and create a new sense of belonging to this planet and to the larger community of humanity.  Science and technology have changed us.  Global economics have changed us.  The world has shrunk and old cultural patterns have changed, but the human race is still adjusting to our growing interdependence and need for cooperation in economics, science, culture, politics and spirituality.  Without evolution in these directions, we can not create sustainable, peaceful relationships with each other and with our planet.

On a personal level, many of us are familiar with the quest to integrate the various aspects of our lives and consciousness - body, mind, spirit, emotion and community.  This process allows us to live in more tranquil and productive ways and makes us more effective as people.  This integrated awareness is inherent in our ancient spiritual traditions, whether they are Judeo-Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, American Indian, Shamanic, etc., but our dominant cultures have become imbalanced.  In addition, the same universal principles that apply to individuals also apply to national and global relationships.  Their application to our collective global awareness can help us to repair our short-circuited and distorted cultures focused on narrow-minded greed and manipulation.  With the integration of body, mind, spirit, emotion and community, we can create new cultural tools for sustainable human living.

"Divine Primates" is a journey, not a blueprint.  We need to avoid our tendency to settle on quick-fixes and "perfect solutions."  The journey is for our long-term survival and we will need all of our intelligence and discerning to avoid painting ourselves into more corners.  Culture is the most powerful tool we have in this process, and yet it is diffuse and anarchic, tending towards fads and fancies rather than wisdom.  If culture remains in the hands of Madison Avenue or Wall Street, we are in terrible trouble.  

Culture that promotes the common good is both the genius and the challenge of democracy.  Will we continue to pay tribute to the gods of consumerism, ideology and technology?  Or, will the "Divine Primate" emerge with the wisdom to control our excesses and cultivate nature rather than be obsessed with dominating it?  We have the tools for both individual and global balance and self-care, but they need to be thoughtfully considered and creatively implemented in ways that create common purpose and trust rather than competition and paranoia.

Please join me in discussion these concepts and sharing your own thoughts!  For more information on Divine Primates, please go to my website.

Moving Beyond Our Consumerist Culture

Sure, we would all like to solve our sustainability problems and live in a world of peace and prosperity. But how do we figure out how to get there? We need to change our culture to emphasize our values for compassion and patience, for long-term benefits over immediate gratification. Can we think beyond our consumerist culture? Beyond the chatter of social and peer pressure? Beyond the needs and expectations of our families and children? Beyond our "needs" for comfort items and status symbols? Beyond our status as people highly privileged to live in the wealthy US? Beyond our need to see ourselves as intelligent and competent? Possibly, but I doubt that we will solve our looming problems by thinking in the same short-term, judgmental, greedy, selfish ways that created our crises in the first place. Are there new ways of thinking?

Warning: this essay will challenge your sense that someone is in control of the human race. Please stop reading if you can not cope with the concept that the human species is brilliant, but entirely clueless about how to live peacefully or sustainably on this planet. Watch a scary movie or go shopping if you need to distract yourself from this reality. . . . . Okay, they're gone now. The adults can talk.

Divine Primates: Hope for Our Stressed-Out Species is a controversial look at who's minding the store - who is guiding and protecting the human species. Many of us would like to think that God is looking out for us. Others believe that our governments are taking care of things, or perhaps the super-rich are managing the human race through some kind of conspiracy or kabal or secret society or trilateral commission. Indeed, even such paranoid fantasies can be immensely reassuring to us, far preferable to the realization that we are a planet full of wonderfully creative, curious primates who have little notion of what we are doing.

And yet, the human species is immensely intelligent, talented, diverse and hopeful. We've just never really cooperated on a global level. We have not yet figured out how to eliminate the ancient patterns of fundamentalism and ideology that divide humans and threaten peace and sustainability in the process. We have principles and rules, like Earth Charter, and the United Nations, but we do not yet trust them. Some religions still oppose population control, stuck in ancient realities that called for expanding our populations to better compete with other religions. Our political and economic ideologies fuel nationalist and consumerist frenzies and resource consumption that threaten our environment with devastation, deforestation, wars, extinctions and famine.

We can do better. We must do better. But we need to step outside of the strange, dysfunctional cultures that have evolved over the centuries to serve short-term theocratic, corporate and political interests and desires. What may have worked in an age of smoke signals and provincialism will not work in an age of globalization, cell phones and the Internet. We need to better understand the nature of human beings and redirect our energies from engaging consumerism and status over to better engaging in humanitarian and long-term efforts to serve and protect humanity and the rest of our natural systems on this planet. In this process, we will evolve further from fundamentalist, exclusive religions over to more open and diverse spiritualities through which all people, including atheists, can find acceptance and community.

A new humanity is evolving. The common goal is partnership and cooperation. This will lead to solutions that allow for equity and sustainability - not just maintaining highly wasteful standards of living for the most wealthy. We will find ways to lead good and free lives. Life is not about "stuff" but about working together towards a sustainable future.

Our Sustainability Problem

I have been working on the sustainability issue for many years and I believe that fundamental changes in the way we see human nature may actually enable us to grasp our predicament regarding sustainability. The concept I use is "Divine Primates." I focus on how our human nature has been manipulated by our cultures, politicians, religions and economic interests so that we crave consumer goods and are judgmental, greedy and self-centered despite the spiritual and common sense values that should lead us towards better caring for our fellow beings and our planet.

I present this idea in more detail in my future book, and its website - www.divineprimates.com. Traditional cultures have used the images of primates to portray human nature's peculiar curiosity and quirky risk-taking. Today, there is a vast body of scientific literature demonstrating how many of the human traits are shared with other primates and other species. If we can begin to see ourselves as primates, perhaps we can bring a good-natured understanding of our role on this planet. We should not monkey around with our environment. We are prone to getting carried away with pointless, self-destructive "needs" and habits.

This is not a new idea, of course. But I do believe that misconceptions about human nature and perfectability are at the core of our irresponsible environmental attitudes and behavior. If we can see ourselves, and our nature, as less god-like and more ape-like we may be better able to keep a sense of humor and not expect ourselves to come up with infinite technological miracles to sustain our unsustainable lifestyles. If we're "just primates" perhaps we can allow our egos to focus more on enjoying our communities and other intangibles and less on hoarding and consuming material goods.

If you believe that we could work together in some way, I'd be happy to hear from you. It is my hope that a concept like "Divine Primates" could help our cultures to understand the impertinence and foolishness of human cultures who behave more like the Chinese "monkey king" or our "curious george" than like the rational beings we falsely believe we are. The human race is wonderful and amazing, but we need to grow up. While disasters will eventually force us to act, I am most concerned that not taking charge of the problems before disasters hit will result in wars, famine and the encouragement of totalitarian states. We need to grow up more quickly.