"Animal" Nature.
I’ll continue the conversation in this post, exploring how fully recognizing our animality positively impacts our time here on Earth.
To begin, let’s take a closer look at this term “animal” - what it suggests, some clarification, and how it’s linked to the divine.
In the last few posts, “animal nature” has served as a placeholder for an expansive concept:
Our desires and tendencies that are a result of being an organism on planet Earth and a product of evolution.
Our animal nature is real, intense, and drives much of day to day human action.
To see it in your own life, you can perform a quick assessment of the root(!) motivation for the daily activities you engage in.
Unless you’re a monk (if you are, awesome and welcome to the blog), the exercise will most likely yield the following discovery - your behavior is overwhelmingly geared towards:
Increasing your (or your family’s) own security.
Improving your level of “attractiveness” relative to others.
Hunting pleasure associated with numbers 1 and 2.
More broadly speaking, most of our behavior can be connected to either survival or mate signaling.
So what’s the big deal? Why is it important that we really see the impact of our “animal nature”?
It is important because the desires and tendencies as a result of our evolution are real - if we’re operating within a physical body that is programmed for particular action, we should understand it.
Secondly, understanding the power of our evolutionary drivers is extremely helpful in making sense of the modern world - at a time that feels increasingly unstable and complex, having a framework to understand behavior (especially if it’s maladaptive) is comforting.
But most importantly (and the point of this post), the recognition of our animality is an important first step on a journey of channeling these characteristics for greater expression of the divine.
The journey will be the topic of the next few posts.