MIND JUNGLE

The first jungles were those with tigers, cobras and fearful diseases. Eventually human society became so complex that it itself sometimes became a jungle. Only since Freud and others documented how complex and messed up the human mind can be have we known about the mind jungle.

It's good to think about the mind jungle for the same reasons it's worth being fully alert and informed along a trail through a tiger's jungle, or when the society jungle around us grows unstable and threatening. We all know those who have fallen victim to ravages of a malfunctioning or out-of-control mind jungle.

The human mind jungle can host an impressive array of mental enemies, but if the discussion is limited to how malfunctioning or recklessly managed human minds are destroying the Earth's biosphere, then there's no more dangerous enemy than self deception. For example, people tell themselves and others that they live environment-friendly lives, but just look at how most of us really live. Willful ignorance is nearly as bad, as when we don't pay attention to the world beyond our neighborhood, or base important judgments on political and/or religious beliefs instead of what can be grasped with one's own mind.

To find the way out of a mind jungle, a beacon is needed, a kind of guiding light on the horizon, welcoming you forward.

A guiding light far away... That's exactly how I visualize the guidance that miraculously becomes available to anyone who for a long time is intimate with Nature and natural things. Nature's influence is to cause us to deeply care about natural things, and natural systems. -- and that includes other humans, and human societies. Caring about them -- "loving" them isn't too strong a word -- causes us to try to avoid destroying them, and to nurture them. It's this caring, loving feeling in us that constitutes the beacon leading us from the malfunctioning, out-of-control mind jungle.

All this sounds like pie-in-the-sky, until we remember the general outline of the evolving Universe's history up to this point: Then, such a spontaneously generated beacon toward higher levels of thinking and feeling seems appropriate:

Universal Creative Impulse --> Big Bang --> Non-living but evolving universe --> evolving life --> evolving mentality --> a guiding light for the mentality