LIKE all life on earth, we human beings are part of a continuing evolutionary process. On the physical level, we have evolved as we should. Our body and brain have adapted over time to the environment we now live in. Our mentality however, has not. Sure, we have learned a lot of things since our cavemen days. We have improved in leaps and bounds intellectually, but that’s not evolution, that’s knowledge learned from trial and error.

Knowledge involves the intellect and requires the ego to constantly update its library as we experience new things. This was essential in our fight for survival and is its sole purpose, but it has also made us more reliant on that ever growing library for ways in which to try and solve the problems of everyday life.

Those ways always involve solutions that must have failed in the past, for if they had not failed, there would be no problem to solve. Ignorant of this fact, the ego keeps rummaging about in its library in the vain hope that it will find an old failed answer that will work this time around – which in fact – keeps us entrenched in our primitive reactions to life events.

The problem we face is that our mind remains on the same level of maturity as it was in the beginning. It has not evolved beyond those days of fight or flight. Basically, we are still cavemen and women in our mental attitude towards life. We have forgotten to bring our mind’s evolutionary status up to the same level as the evolution of our physical body. This can be demonstrated when we are caught unawares.

The old survival syndrome rears its ugly head whenever something happens that we don’t expect. Our hair stands on end, we get a cold shiver down our spine or we flush red with anger and the veins in our neck stand out as we instinctively get ready for fight or flight, exhibiting the physical signs of the ancient emotions of fear, anger and anxiety etc.

In other words, we react with violence whenever we feel we are threatened. Similar emotional reactions are felt when something good and exciting happens that gives us a thrill. Those emotions are just as violent, for if they stop or are taken away from us, the emotion can quickly change to disappointment, frustration, depression, hate or anger.

In the past, our mind has been able to compensate for our physical evolution, although millions of our fellow human beings and countless other species have died in the process, but that way is getting more difficult to sustain. The situation is now critical for our mind has fallen so far behind physical evolution that it is no longer able to compensate.

The evolution of our mind is made difficult for we are conditioned at an early age to accept outside authorities and second hand sources for our ‘knowledge of evolution’. We read about evolution in schools and are shown evidence of it in pictures, bones and fossils.

This is only knowledge about physical evolution – evolution of our body and the bodies of other creatures. It has absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of our mind. Unlike our records of physical evolution, evidence of the evolution of mind is not recorded for the simple reason that since our caveman days, the mind has never evolved.

The ever increasing gap between physical and mind evolution, creates many problems in our world today, and because we are so mentally immature, we attempt to treat those problems in an isolated way, trying to solve them independently of one another. We create committees, rehabilitation centers, law enforcement agencies, government bureaucracies, yet no matter how many departments we invent, the problems increase. You can see this for yourself in the world today.

The problems we have are only symptoms. They are not the real issue. If only symptoms are dealt with, when we believe we have solved a problem, it will pop up in some other place. The real problem is that the old ways no longer work. We have adolescent minds that are incapable of coping with the issues of today.

We are concerned about the ever growing problem of drugs and so try to do something about it. In the vain hope of solving this problem, we outlaw drugs, build rehabilitation centers, but we are not looking at the real problem at all. The problem with drugs is not the drugs themselves.

The problem is that they offer some of us a more interesting alternative than living life. Taking drugs dulls us to the stresses of daily life, stresses brought on by our very adolescence, and as long as that is the case, there will be a continuing problem with drugs.

Not only drugs are used as a distraction, such things as extreme sports, dangerous stunts and many other forms of excitement are used – the latest being the internet – especially on mobile devices, that give us access anywhere we are to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. All of these can be used as ways of occupying our mind and dulling us to life.

All of these other distractions just mentioned, as with drugs, are not a problem to us unless we cannot live without them. If we suffer a downer when coming off a high from indulging in any of these other pastimes and suffer such emotions as depression until we can experience them again, they are no different to drugs – in fact they are a drug.

Once again, it is the ego that is the culprit. The ego needs excitement, entertainment, thrills and spills to give it the illusion of being real – which it is not. When life is peaceful and there are no dramas occurring – look out – the ego is on edge. Boredom, restlessness and irritation are then felt.

Summing it up, it seems we have been and are still, looking in the wrong place. If it’s the wrong place then, where do we look? For it has become imperative that we find it!

Dan’s Quote: “The greater our knowledge increases… 
_____________the more our ignorance unfolds.”- John F. Kennedy

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