Surprise surprise - isn't this by any chance what sets humans apart? Except perhaps our ability to perceive ourselves as having some God-given destiny?

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Out of the drawer for today:

What Distinguishes Humankind

So we are all animals? - to a point, I dare say, yes

Two forks later...

...it is a threesome that we have!

In this whole process of coming into being, of being shaped from clay - or as some dare put it, in stepping through thefphases of evolution, as we can see more clearly through modern eyes, there appears to have been different manifestations of us, each equipped with what made us successful survivors in specific scenarios, populated with different competitors for resources and for space.

Our true history is likely quite complex, but for the fun of it, and for the sake of painting a simple picture that might just contribute a little to us understanding ourselves a bit better, I will dare to simplify our development as follows:

The Animal Phase

This may be where it all started...a phase in which survival of the fittest had more complex and able species survive in different niches; but it is also a phase in which herding showed its advantages - an age in which the formation of social structures had it's roots...where mutual guardianship had individuals survive better whithin communities than whithout the protection of these natural social structures.

The Humanizing Phase

Now in this phase, one may guess, it is possible that cognition matured to the extent that social behaviour became an objectively contrived strategy, where we objectively started seeing the advantages of being part of a community as opposed to attempting to survive as individuals in the wild and maybe even had success in strenthening communities by deliberately cooperating and incorporating synergy of specialised skills and talents to the advantage of the community as a whole...who knows?

We may even have had great success and maybe even started seeing ourselves as masters of nature, destined to be not only mutual guardians amongs ourselves, but also guardians of nature as the pantry supplying our means of survival. Maybe we where not at that stage capable of an objective philosophy with such a clearly defined objective; maybe it was only so that an opportunity for that kind of relationship between us and nature then became manifest as a future option.

Maybe this was the age of Eden. Maybe this is also where we developed a taste for quality of life so powerful that obtaining a good qualty of life started competing in importance as a goal in itself, with the matter of survival, so strongly that it in fact led to the next phase in the development of what we are today:

Enter The Snake

A slumbering virus finds fertile ground...

A stable condition, with more talent going round in large and safe communities than is required to be vigilant for the sake of survival, may just have been where our by now dormant skills for survival in the wild became aware of opportunities very much akin to the opportunities for survival in the wild, but with the difference that the goal in facilitating those opportunities became perverted from being survival at the cost of natural enemies to being enhancement of own quality of life at the cost of fellow human beings - the birth of evil...the manifestation of Satan as a spirit of exploitation in our midst!

Conclusion

And there we have it, a subconscious threesome: animal, man and monster, all part and parcel of our mental make-up.

And isn't it interesting how the sequential coming into being of these parts in this narrative matches the sequence of events in the Scriptural mythology we are all familiar with? Does this perhaps tell us that what is written in those ancient scripts is more fact that fiction - that perhaps the author(s) of those scripts had a perfectly valid scientific understanding of our origin?

Be that as it may - what is pretty clear from this understanding is that our greatest enemy resides within us, and that "chaining down the devil/monster/evil spirit" right within us makes perfect sense, that is, if we wish to obtain a perfect, peaceful, 'heavenly' quality of life.

And does this story perhaps tell us that what distinguishes us from, physiologically speaking, 'the rest of the animal kingdom', is that we crave quality of life nearly as much as life itself, and that is in this craving that our temptation for exploiting one another lies?

Please comment an tell me what you think of this perception - I would really like to hear if it makes sense for you as well!

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Thanks for reading!
- more to follow...

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Blessings!

And do remember not to believe a word i say, unless it cannot be denied!

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_{Images : Kudos to Paint X for providing the software!
Photos, if any : Own}