1.2 In the darkest place, the deepest compassion
Once I decided to upgrade love, I figured I’d better look behind the scenes at conventional love to see what was wrong with it. And that’s what I did, and when I did, I saw that…
What’s wrong is really, really wrong.
And I saw that…
Some big, important things we call love aren’t love at all.
Then I dug down into the history of human evolution to see how human love got started, how it developed over millennia in our hunter-gatherer tribes, and how it came to be what it is now. I figured I couldn’t upgrade something I didn’t understand.
But when I got down to the bottom of our operating system, I found myself in treacherous territory. Down there…
I came face to face with the source of human evil.
And immediately I could see that evolution’s version of love is no match for this evil. But then I saw something worse.
In songs and sermons we tell ourselves that love is the answer. What if that’s not true?
What if love is the problem?
What if…
It’s not we who are failing love, but love which is failing us?
Look at the state of the world and it’s obvious that…
Love is not winning.
Obvious, except who wants to look?
Yet if we do look, we see that our world is filled with mass suffering, and conventional love is not stopping that.
We see mass exploitation running our economies, and love is not changing that.
We see political strife everywhere, and love is not curing that.
Now, here we are on the verge of extinction, and…
Love as it is, try as it might, is not saving us.
Activists have come up with hundreds of smart strategies which they believe could make the crucial difference for us. But their salvation hopes are not going to come true, because not enough of us are going to actually do enough of those things. We just aren’t. We’re too contentious and contrary.
To save ourselves, we’d need to pull ourselves together into one cooperative, unified, global team to take mass action…
But we don’t love each other enough to do that.
The problem we have is not a how–to problem. It’s a problem of who we are…
Late one Saturday afternoon, dozing over my reading in my easy chair, I started nap–dreaming. I saw myself holding a sad blue candle of inquiry before of me as I descended into the deep cave of human nature, plodding along, down and down, turn after turn, until far underground I came upon her, the Keeper of the Secret, seated on her weathered wooden throne. I stopped in front of her, ready to demand an answer.
But she knew what I had come for and before I could speak, she leaned forward, whispered in my ear as if to comfort me, “You are made wrong.” Then enveloped my candle in her huge hand, crushed it out, put her lips to my forehead, and in the darkness, gave me the kiss of death.
For us humans to actually see ourselves as we really are is utterly painful, because…
We are made wrong.
This was not the conclusion I was hoping to get to. And I figured there was worse to come. But retreating, going back to how I was living before I found my mission, surrendering to my childhood, was not an option. There was too much suffering back there.
So I pushed forward. And copped an attitude—if we’re made wrong then I want to know exactly how and why.
In the last two hundred years, we’ve learned magnitudes more about our inner workings than in the preceding two to three hundred thousand, the entire life span of Homo sapiens.
What Darwin and his successors have discovered about human evolution and what therapists and researchers have discovered about human psychology is breakthrough stuff. It’s not that every bit of it has been accurate or helpful, but enough of it has been that we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to know ourselves in the deepest way.
But how many people want to know?
Ancient Greek philosophers urged their fellow citizens to “Know Thyself!” They inscribed that exhortation over the doorway of the temple of Apollo, where seekers went to listen to the famous Oracle of Delphi.
Some of those ancients were not really into self–knowledge. To them, “know thyself” meant you should know your place in society and stay there. For others, though, it meant more like what we mean by it today—figure out why you do what you do and what might make human community work better.
But those intellectually ambitious Greeks could be happy in their pursuit of self–knowledge only because they weren’t delving down into the deepest wellspring of human behavior.
These days we’ve got New Age teachers who urge us to know ourselves, but they say it like this…
Know your true self.
What they’re actually telling us to do is cherry–pick…
Take all the things you like—caring, kindness, creativity, compassion—gather them together in a bouquet, add a bow, and call that your true self.
Anything you don’t like—envy, greed, gossip, hatred—call that your false self, cram it into a garbage bag, and dump it.
The one thing I like about this reframing is the aspirational flair. You imagine the person you wish to be, then you do your best to live up to that wish.
If, however, you start believing this invented “true self” is the same thing as the whole of the real self evolution has given you, you’re going to get into trouble because those rejected parts don’t go away. You can suppress them, but only for so long. Eventually they will leak out or break out and sabotage you.
But maybe that doesn’t sound so bad when you realize that if, by contrast, you venture down to our source, down to the very bottom of our human nature, what you will find there is…
Our too-true self.
It’s down there at the bottom of our OS that the truth of how we are made confronts us not only with a distressing picture of humanness, but with something worse, the foreclosure of our future, by which I mean…
The death of hope.
That’s what happened to me. I suddenly saw that the stubborn, innate divisiveness of our species is the cause of the danger we’re in. And the closer I looked at that divisiveness, the more I came to believe…
It’s too late for us to save ourselves.
The way I see it, hope is Humpty–Dumpty. It’s fallen and shattered and nothing and no one can put it back together again.
This is not where I wanted to end up. I hate that hope’s gone, I really hate it. But I do believe it’s gone. And after decades of living without hope, I can tell that it’s not coming back, not for me.
So I want to warn you, if you take the journey that goes with this mission to upgrade love, if you go down to the bottom of humanness, the same might happen to you. You’re risking the loss of hope.
Which is a terrible loss.
But not as uncommon as it used to be. Think about all the young people who look at the world in despair and say…
“I don’t get to have a future.”
Or the parents who say…
“I’m sorry I brought a child into this dying world. If I had it to do over, I might not.”
As the crises we’re facing multiply and worsen, as the danger we’re in becomes more visible and undeniable, more and more people will be crossing over, leaving hope behind, landing here on the far side of hope, and wondering what to do next, wondering how to make a new life for themselves.
The most important evolutionary fact about us humans is that…
We’re a social-group species.
All during the millennia when we were still growing into what we’ve become, we lived in small bands within relatively small tribes. Our tribe was our home. And anything outside was foreign territory.
Within our tribes, we had a special ability. We were super–cooperative. Ants, bees, wasps, and termites are by far the most successful of the more than a million species of insects. That’s because they’re super–cooperative.
But they run their cooperation on instinct. So it’s rigid and done by rote. Our cooperation is much more difficult to manage and sustain, but it’s many times more powerful. It’s got complexity which gives it adaptability.
And the upshot? Our super–cooperation is why we’ve been able…
To take dominion over the earth.
Our special kind of togetherness has given us powers that our earliest ancestors never dreamed of.
But there’s a wrench in the works…
We’ve got a boundary issue.
The explanation is simple….
Inside our tribes we cooperate.
But…
Outside our tribes we compete.
And do so fiercely. Because for our species, outsiders are considered dangerous. Sometimes we’ll make alliances with them, as long as the alliance benefits us. But even then, we’re always prepared to switch back to our adversarial stance the minute the alliance stops working.
Our tribe is the key to our survival. So we see outsiders as not just garden variety threats, but…
Existential threats.
The rule of thumb is that you have to be ready to fight for your tribe with everything you’ve got whenever it comes under attack. Like if a neighboring tribe decides to take over your hunting grounds or steal your females for breeding or take for themselves other resources you have.
And you need to be able to kill without mercy whenever your tribe decides to attack another group to take from them what they have.
So when I say we’ve got a boundary issue, I’m not talking about a minor glitch. I’m talking about a core feature of humanness that when acted out, can become….
Brutal and bloody.
Add this all up and it’s clear that our tribal nature is what…
Made us.
We probably would not have become the kind of global species we are without it. We might not have even survived.
But now this tribal nature has turned against us, and it’s…
Killing us.
It’s so deeply embedded in our genome that its grip on us is proving impossible to break.
Tribalism is fundamental to who we are. And people get righteous about defending it. So I call it…
Tribal fundamentalism.
Many activists these days tell us that climate change is our #1 problem, but it’s not…
We are our #1 problem.
We’ve got a flaw that’s proving fatal…
Our us-versus-them operating system.
You’ve heard it said…
Under the skin we’re all the same.
Which raises the question…
So why can’t we all just get along?
It’s true that under the skin we are all the same because we share the same genome. But we’re the same in being…
Compulsively divisive.
That’s built into us. That’s how our genome works. And that’s why we’re in terrible trouble. Our divisiveness is now determining our fate.
And this doesn’t seem fair because look at us. We’re the apex species. We’re the triumph of evolution. We thrive in environments from scorching deserts to frozen tundra. We’ve built our numbers from next to nothing to over seven billion…
So we’re a grand success.
Aren’t we?
Our operating system has given us so much. Look at the world we’ve created for ourselves. All the good things. All the comforts. All the wonders.
But what made us is now breaking us, and this feels so wrong, and it feels like a betrayal, and it makes me mad, really, really mad…
Fighting mad.
Because…
We didn’t ask to be made like we are.
And…
We didn’t ask for evil to be so easy and love to be so hard.
Which makes me feel for us.
It makes me feel compassion for us, the deepest compassion I’ve ever felt. Not nice–guy compassion, but…
A fierce compassion.
And because of this I became an alchemist, with a talent I didn’t know I had for…
Turning hard truths into sweet blessings.
I once went to a workshop where the leader, a spiritual guru, told us with confident authority to…
Love what is.
That’s the way to peace and contentment, she said. Stop fighting with the universe and accept the way things are.
But I don’t love what is. I don’t love the violence and suffering that fills our world. I don’t love how evolution has set us up for failure.
I’ve heard many spiritual teachers say…
The universe has your back. It will look after you. Trust it.
I understand why they say this. It’s a lot more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that evolution, an instrument of the universe, made us in the same haphazard, experimental way it does everything. It doesn’t care how much we suffer. It doesn’t care if we live or die. It doesn’t care because it can’t care because…
It doesn’t have a heart.
Evolution has left us on our own to fend for ourselves. But we need help. We do. We need someone bigger than us, someone capable of compassion, to look after us.
I understand why our ancestors made up gods and goddesses. They wanted to imagine there was some kind of parental force looking out for us. They were trying to imagine a world in which there’s a source of nurturance much bigger than us.
But the fact is we are all we’ve got. If we want nurturance, if we want compassion, we need to give it to ourselves.
And now I’m remembering myself back in my early twenties. I was such a mess. And I was obsessed with fixing myself. But I missed a step. I wish I had been able to start by saying to myself…
You’re hurting. And badly. I wish for you to have compassion for yourself. You didn’t ask to be such a mess. You didn’t ask to hurt like you do. You have a deep longing to do better and be better. And I want you to feel that. I want you to feel for yourself. I want you to love yourself in that way. That first, and then you can work on fixing yourself, doing it with self–love instead of self–hate.
I wish we as a species could do the same. We get so focused on saving ourselves that we forget that first step…
We’re a species in deep trouble and we’re scared. Too scared to even let ourselves feel just how scared we are and how much we’re hurting.
But…
If we don’t feel for ourselves deeply, why would we fight for ourselves as fiercely as we need to?
If I had to sum up this book in a single sentence it would be this…
Feel for yourself and fight for yourself.
And for the people you care about.
And for our species which needs more care than it will ever get.
There’s the old saying, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Our operating system is our first and greatest enemy.
But when we drag it out into the open and make it give up its secrets, when we do this work, we no longer have to be scared of the unknown…
Instead we get to be scared of the known.
Which I’m okay with, because once we get down to the bottom of who we are, that’s it, we’re at the bottom. We’re no longer at the mercy of forces we don’t understand. There’s no more mystification…
Now we’re on solid ground where we can stand and fight.
