are tried to be introduced.
Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads
and empty hearts can do that. ― Norman Vincent Peale
Humankind, in fact, has always faced only one question – its survival. Throughout their existence on the planet, people have refined the forms and models of survival, accumulated knowledge, and developed skills. And all this in order to live to an age when they could contribute their unique genetic material to a global planetary experiment they are involved in.
And over time, practising their survival, people have achieved significant success. They tirelessly improved hunting techniques, settled in new homes, cultivated crops, and developed ways to protect themselves from wild animals and neighbouring tribes. Along with these changes, new demands have emerged – to live as long as possible and as better and easier as possible. In other words, the requirements have changed not only for the time a person has lived on the Earth but also for the quality of this time. People’s ideas and the very texture of their behaviour have changed. They transformed the innate biological mechanisms of survival – defensive aggression, stress, competition – into categories and concepts of envy, vanity, greed, adultery, and the list goes on.
People began to devote more and more time to the realisation of their most sophisticated desires, called ideas, the connection of which with survival is still very doubtful. Choosing a suitable survival model and implementing it is what a person does all his or her life.
The survival model includes decisions such as choosing a profession and place of work, graduating from prestigious universities, developing skills, accumulating knowledge, and interacting with the surroundings. The amplitude of relationships with the surroundings often disappoints a person when they feel hypocrisy, servility and grovelling, but they adapt, because it becomes acceptable for them; it is also a survival model.
There is no good or bad model, there is one that suits an individual specifically. Irreconcilable contradiction in any model is just a term. The desire to survive reconciles everything and everyone. Assembling their model piece by piece, with their job, education, skills, language skills, citizenship, and everything else possible, people try to make it work at all levels of their goals and associations.
People allow the goal to determine the means to achieve it. The world is a market. A giant market as big as humankind. The model that people choose, what they do and what they strive for, shape their environment. They choose the environment, and the environment chooses them.
On the one hand, life is a race where the model is endlessly improved to adapt to changing circumstances. This benefits those at higher levels, who are precisely the ones engaged in constantly changing the rules and circumstances. On the other hand, life is a person’s accumulated experience.
People are disappointed. People are afraid that any new ideas, goals and meanings of changes in the social system or their way of life will no longer serve their interests. They are afraid because they are sure that any new social contract between levels carries with it only the possibility of creating a new level of ‘elites’.
At the same time, the exact 'elites’ or groups of influence that have a monopoly on creating and distributing the leading narratives and meanings of such a community system are well aware and take advantage of the fact that when creating any new narrative, there is only one mandatory condition. This narrative must be at least somehow connected with the meaning of an individual’s personal goals. And it does not matter how – with promises or real steps. Everything else can be ignored, and the narrative can continue to be interpreted and supplemented as desired, depending on the need for the current historical moment.
Therefore, not all narratives are accepted by people as long as their personal goals are threatened by issues like hunger, unemployment, hardships, and poverty. Try to deprive any person of a source of income – they will do exactly what they need to provide for their immediate needs and do whatever it takes for this. It is enough to recall the experiments on behaviour mentioned earlier. As long as there is a monetary system and maintained shortages of resources, the defining narratives will be the ones that are most in line with the model of human physical survival.
There is still something that can influence people’s behaviour after they have resolved problems with basic survival. Nowadays, this is a tremendous space for influencing and controlling human behaviour through meanings.
When the term 'meaning’ is mentioned, the last link in the chain of its descriptions is reasoning about the meaning of life. People managed to come up with a lot of definitions and designs for this, in their opinion, important concept. It might be, for example: 'This is who you want to be and what you want to create.' Or: 'To be, rather than to seem.' Thus, by the way, people constantly repeat and calmly continue to seem throughout all their lives, and not to be.
Some people present their true purpose as the mission with which they were sent to this world. And the contents of their last report, which has been taking their breath away all their life, will be presented with awe at the heavenly throne. But many, and most of them, perceive their destiny as a series of important, in their opinion, goals, the end result of which is seen as material benefits, position in society, scientific discoveries or mental balance and self-improvement.
But, thank God, everything is simpler. From the point of view of nature, the meaning of life is in life itself. A person’s goal and purpose is to continue to live. From the formula: 'Plant a tree, build a house, have a son,' for nature, the goal is only the latter. All the rest people have made up for themselves, and not because they are bored or narcissistic impostors. This is because the goals of a person’s brain and life goals are different.
The meanings people find in poems, novels, business, painting, politics, or all of them together exist as part of a chosen survival model to realise their primary purpose – to continue living.
Today’s world is a world made up of opportunities and limitations, but a world where ultimately the choice is always up to the individual. The choice is up to his or her models. Previously, people went through rituals, initiations, mentors, teachers, and universities to make this choice. Now, websites, blogs, groups, and subscriptions are used. The impact on humans has increased by an order of magnitude.
In order to understand all this, people turn to their consciousness. Turn to something that they do not know much about, and much less what it is actually intended for. At the same time, people confuse the concepts of brain and consciousness, and these are not exactly the same things.
The task of the brain, as we said, is survival. One of the functions of the brain is consciousness, which allows a person to adapt meaningfully and accurately to changing circumstances, adjust forms of behaviour and create new ones. This conscious adaptation is the highest ability that exists in the living world.
How did people get this unique tool? What is it and how is it designed?
Paradise: The Story of Abdication
When you point your index finger at someone else,
the other three fingers point at you. ― Anonymous
The unique ability to justify oneself and transfer responsibility to the surroundings has been around since the beginning of time, since the origin of man. The most famous story about this tells how the fruit of the tree of knowledge was secretly eaten in the well-known garden in Mesopotamia. Already in this story, humanity tries not
