The Brain Virus
Chet Shupe
The Brain Virus
What Our Brains don’t want Us to Know
By Chet Shupe
Author of:
Eden—Regaining our Spiritual Freedom
Copyright 2014 Chet Shupe
The Brain Virus
What Our Brains don’t want Us to Know
As the pressures that human cultures place on the environment increase, maybe it’s time to rethink the materialism that defines the modern world. Though we revere legal systems, because we see them as providing us the freedom to pursue personal wealth and privilege, they in fact compel us to largely focus on wealth and privilege as our only avenue to happiness. Unfortunately, this perspective is not only threatening to denature the environment, it fails to satisfy our essential human need for intimacy.
Two questions arise: Are we really happy? Is wealth and privilege what humans really want? I don’t think so. I believe what we want most in life is the happiness of loving, and of being loved, unconditionally. The problem with wealth and privilege is that it results in independence, not the interdependence that combines the two essentials for love—having others who care for us, and being there to care for them. We have trapped ourselves, it seems, in an existence where we devote our lives to pursuing something we don’t really want.
Just as a computer virus can misdirect a computer’s output, our brains seem to have also been infected with a virus. This “brain virus” manifests itself by inspiring us to make choices that lead to unhappiness, instead of the happiness we seek.
Emotions Express the Survival Wisdom of Our Species
The brain virus has us believing that happiness comes primarily from gratifying our material needs. Satisfying material needs is important—up to a point—but how we satisfy them is far more important.
Before the virus existed, humans functioned as members of a social species. We secured our material needs by the simple act of taking care of our brothers and sisters and being taken care of by them. In effect, our brothers and sisters served us in the same way our bank account does, now, by insuring our present and future wellbeing. As a result, we now love money as much as we once loved them. The difference between loving people and loving money is that people can do something that bank accounts can’t—people can love us back. When we have love, we don’t need that much, materially, to be happy.
This virus-caused misdirection of our attitudes and sensibilities has so universally skewed our perspective on life that the presence of the virus is imperceptible, to us. To detect the virus, we must address our circumstances from an entirely new, yet much simpler point of view. We need to recognize the key role of emotions in the life of a species, which is: Emotions exist to inspire the behaviors required for the species to flourish. Consequently, any species that operates in contradiction to its natural feelings cannot long endure. To recognize this—that feelings express the survival wisdom of the species—is to be amazed that something so essential, simple, and fundamental isn’t common knowledge. That it isn’t can be explained in only one way: It is something that the brain virus doesn’t want us to know.
Legal Truth is Not True
The brain virus, you see, thrives on compelling us to deny our feelings of the moment, in order to secure our future needs. Our recognition that both happiness and our species’ eventual survival are dependent on being true to our feelings of the moment is something the brain virus cannot allow. That knowledge is the one thing that could defeat it. So, although I trust that most of the things you are about to read will make sense on a point-to-point basis, be forewarned, it is not easy reading. How can it be? It’s all about things our brains do not want us to know—including mine, when they first occurred to me.
The brain virus not only has us pursuing happiness in wealth and privilege, it inspires us to organize in mass societies. That is, it possesses us with the desire to organize life under a system of legally-imposed truth, so that everyone in the land can secure their personal needs, and still peacefully co-exist. The problem is that no such “truth” exists, legal or otherwise.
This isn’t to say that truth, itself, doesn’t exist. There are factual truths that clearly do exist, such as historical truth, the laws of physics, truth regarding the location of resources, and truth about how we feel. These truths are real, because they are verifiable by direct experience—past or present. Legal truth differs from real truth in three ways. First, it cannot be verified by direct experience, because its consequences reside in the distant future—a domain that does not yet exist. For instance, how could the people who instituted the first monetary system ever have imagined the eventual consequences of such systems—spiritual alienation, our separation from the land, the industrial revolution, atomic weapons, and finally, global habitat destruction, to name a few? Second, unlike real truth, legal truth exists only where there are central authorities to impose it. And the third way legal truth differs from real truth is that it is not universal.
The test for truth—surely we agree—is that it must be universal, which means that, to be real, there must be only one truth, only one true history, only one law that applies to the velocity of a falling object, only one truth regarding the location of a specific watering hole. And, as to our feelings—though there may be conflicts among them—they define only one state of mind at any point in time.
Legal truth fails the test of universality in two ways: It varies among jurisdictions, sometimes radically: It changes with the passage of every law. Yet, we allow it to govern our lives as though it were ageless and utterly real. Why do we subjugate our lives to a “truth” that is neither verifiable nor universal? We do so because we see legal truth as the absolute requirement for social order. Our willingness to remain subjects of legal truth—even kill on its behalf—reveals that we are far more concerned with order than with truth.
Like the Universe, Life is Ordered by Unseen Forces
That we are more concerned about order than truth isn’t surprising. Order is essential to our existence. The question is: Is legal truth, in fact, required for order? I argue that it isn’t. A system of laws can create order among the masses, for awhile. But, because legal systems codify inequitable distribution of resources, material deprivation eventually builds to the point that most people become more concerned about satisfying their immediate needs than about social order. At that point, the chaos of revolution erupts, which, if successful, restores hope, by instituting a new system of legal truth—that is, a new system for codifying the inequitable distribution of resources.
But how can there be order, without instituted laws? Clearly, the animal world is ordered, and animals do not have legal systems. The animal world is apparently ordered by unseen forces. That unseen forces are at play should not surprise us. The physical universe is governed by gravitational, electro-magnetic, and subatomic forces, all unseen.
If unseen forces govern the animal world, what might those forces be? Those who love animals know that animal behavior is governed by feelings. If hungry, animals eat. If cold, they find shelter. If feeling amorous, they have sex. If lonely, they find others to be with. If moved to sacrifice themselves, or to kill, they do so. The order we observe in the animal world results from each individual behaving according to its most dominant feeling, at each moment of its existence. Emotions are clearly the unseen forces that express the “laws of life.”
Emotions express the laws of life for humans also. But, because emotions are unseen, we are as unaware of the laws of life, as we were of the laws of physics, until only a few seconds ago, in evolutionary time.
Unaware, as we are, that unseen forces are already present to guide, govern, and protect the life of a species, humans see law and order as the only thing that stands between us and chaos. Wri
tten laws are not only visible, they are instituted with the intent of changing human behavior from its natural, organic bent. This is tantamount to instituting new equations, in order to change the effects of gravity on the velocity of falling objects. The problem is that the universe works only one way. And so does life. Life’s way is unique to each species. It is also organic and imprecise, but its sum total is accessible to us, only moment to moment, through our emotions—or as I like to think of it, the human spirit.
The difference between the laws of physics, and those of life is that the behavior of falling objects can’t be changed by instituting laws, while human behavior can. It’s just that, in each instance of such change, there’s a price to pay in terms of emotional pain and, ultimately, in our species’ ability to survive. The starkest, most extreme example of this occurred when humanity underwent its institutionally-imposed transformation from a social species to a pair bonding one.
Because institutions exist to change human behavior from its natural
