Are We Alone?

                                                 Are We Alone?

 

 

                    

 

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.”   Thomas Merton

There are two very profound and fundamental questions at certain levels of psycho-social-spiritual development. I think they are, in order of, first; “How connected does one feel to another?” This is about our essential early bonding experience that is especially formative in bio/psycho/social/spiritual development. If there is poor bonding/attachment/connection or even none, there is a severe level of arrested and pathological constructs and symptoms that occur. This has been substantiated in studies with monkeys who were given wire surrogate inanimate models of mothers with food, or terrycloth mothers without food, they chose the terrycloth mothers to the point of starving themselves. Studies with infants in orphanages who have had little to no human touch or psycho-social bonding in early life fared very poorly in life in many ways.

The second question equally important, but has to be second in relation to how helpless and dependent we are as infant primate mammals, is; “How do I become an individual, an autonomous person?” Carl Roger's book “On Becoming A Person,” is all about this, as well as Jung's writing on individuation. To Jung individuation is; the process in which the individual self develops out of an undifferentiated unconscious - seen as a developmental psychic process during which innate elements of personality, the components of the immature psyche, and the experiences of the person's life become integrated over time into a well-functioning whole.

As humans, it is a lifelong task to maintain this sense of connection and communion with others and our environment, as well as to feel our own individual sovereignty and be a unique self-contained individual. Traditionally, the East and West differ in these respects, the East being much more “We/Us” oriented and the West world view of “I, Me, Mine,” the self actualizers, or self-reliance as Emerson would write.

There is an interesting parallel in these two basic tasks in life and our preoccupation with the question; “Are we alone in the Universe?” The question we should be asking first is; "Are we alone on this planet?" Are we acting in ways where we are reinforcing ideas of separation, from each other, from ourselves, from nature, from God or whatever concepts/beliefs about divinity?

Jung wrote about a collective unconscious which is the repository of all mythology and archetypes that play over and over in history, art, politics, science, religion, etc. We 'inherit' and access the collective cultural archetypes as if we were dreaming a collective dream, just as we inherit and access our own individual psychic material and process our own individual unconscious in our own personal dreaming every night.

When you dream, you are meeting in another world as it were, you are not yourself in the usual sense, that is your ego is not running the show (at least not as much as waking consciousness). Your dreams are a place where you experience every night that you are not alone. You go on a little trip to unplanned, often unknown, and weird places, doing strange things, and having unexpected outcomes. Your dreams are always telling you something you don't know, so don't take them for granted!

Likewise, when we go to the movies, play/work on a team, go out in nature, spend time with a good friend, make passionate love, etc. we also experience something bigger than ourselves that lets us know that we're not alone, people actually love us, like us, see us, care about us, and include us into a belonging in some kind of communal experience. This is empirical, measurable, and qualitative experience we have through our senses and beyond our senses into spiritual dimensions.

So the next time someone asks you if you think we're alone tell them “No!”