Beyond the Homo Sapiens

Beyond the Homo Sapiens
Synopsis

Beyond the Homo Sapiens is the story of a woman’s search, as told to her daughter, for something that will help her make sense of the chaos she witnesses in the world. The search leads her on an exploration of history, philosophy and mysticism. It relates our present personal traumas and problems to those that seem to have affected mankind since the inception of the world.

Her name is Ariadne and she was born in Colombia, South America, in 1946. She was a "pink diaper baby," one of the many children that the radicals of the 30s and 40s brought to the world. Born to a family who loved culture, Ariadne was able to identify with it early in life. Her father, a lover of Greek philosophy who earned his living as an accountant, ingrained in her a zest and enthusiasm for the world of ideas.

As a young adult, the birth of her beloved daughter Alexiara, gave her a sense of responsibility that spurred her need to understand her feelings of alienation from the society to which she was born. To escape that barrier she emigrated with her daughter and younger sister Selene, from Bogota to New York. There she finds herself just as alienated from this new society. That's when she realizes the only way out is to understand herself and why she didn't seem to fit any where, in any society, in any group.

Beyond the Homo Sapiens is Ariadne's exploration of her own psyche and the symbols and archetypes that automatically flow into consciousness from the unconscious, and which are a link to the archetypes of the entire human race. Having become a painter, she uses her work to freeze the images that reached her consciousness from the unconscious, and followed their thread wherever they led. With her work she entered the adventure of self-discovery, confronting in herself, what is human (the lamb) and what is inhuman (the wolf) in all of us. To help herself, she applied the Jungian principle that the images were telling her a story. Thus, she began the process that Jung calls Individuation, the process of integrating the unconscious into the conscious to activate the Transcendent faculty of the psyche, which can help us walk towards Self, which corresponds to the mystical idea of the Spiritual Center.

Ariadne's desire for truth is within us all, but her love for her daughter led her to heed that calling and spurred her quest for the means to tame her own animal instincts. That is the first step on the road to going Beyond the Homo Sapiens. And to follow that path we need to understand our history as Homo Sapiens.

That is why Ariadne studies history as she struggles to comprehend the value system of the prehistoric, historic and contemporary Homo Sapiens and how the misconceptions, or taboos, of each generation have been carried into those of the next; how the chasm between the ideals man proclaims and the reality he creates, was first carved and why it continues. She soon began to see history with new eyes and discovered that the Homo Sapiens has not ended his evolutionary process.

Unicellular life with its protoplasm as the basic brick of life, first learned to fight for survival over 2,000 million years ago. A mere forty thousand years ago, the modern Homo Sapiens achieved the apex of his biological evolution. Fifty trillion cells compose a Homo Sapient. Fifty trillion cells whose protoplasm is still ingrained with the instincts of sex reproduction, survival, and immediate gratification inherited from our animal evolutionary process. That animal instinct, combined with our self-awareness and our mental ability to let our will be done, makes man a beast more dangerous than any animal.

Since prehistoric times, men and women concluded that they are weak in relation to the surrounding world of nature. Everything seemed to be an enemy that they had to flee from or fight. This is why they needed their warrior hero. Our own feeling of weakness led to the glorification of the heroic warrior and later to the vilification of the Spiritual Hero, who taught them that there is nothing to fear because the Universe is One with Spirit.

To understand how to go beyond the Homo Sapiens' wrong opinions, Ariadne had to unlearn her basic animal instinct and assumptions. History had pushed her and all of her contemporaries to the brink. Mankind, she felt, had to find the means to mediate its power with Spiritual understanding. That was the only way we could use it for our betterment instead of our destruction. She saw that the race following the warrior hero archetype is walking a path without an exit. Historically, the Homo Sapiens was able to survive his instinct because he did not have much scientific and technological capabilities. But since the industrial revolution, and mainly in this century, he became a menace to himself. With his bestial head, and his extended bionic body, he is destroying the ecosystem that gives him life and nourishes him. He is poisoning the waters, destroying the ozone layer, and has escalated the genocide against his brothers and sisters with new and improved war toys.

Ariadne saw the need to reinvent herself and that required a completely new perspective. She had to enter dimensions more real than the temporal, navigate the cosmos nude and alone, caress the nebula, go up stairs of atoms, escape unending and unbearable labyrinths. She had to find the answers to the age-old questions that few individuals in each generation have ever tried to answer: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why does evil happen?

Through her search she comes to the realization that Ideas do not originate in people, but are expressed through people. Therefore, our common history has a lot to teach us if we extract the essence of what is Truth and timeless in it. Individuals in each generation have sifted these kernels of truth from the erroneous conceptions of the time. History consists of these truths threaded together like a pearl necklace. Ariadne realized this was the thread that could bring us out of the labyrinth. She also saw that our history has been clearly divided into Three Acts in the drama of life. We are beginning the Fourth.

The name Ariadne was chosen to link the character with the Greek myth of the Labyrinth. In classical mythology, the Minotaur was born to the queen of Crete after she mated with a sacred bull. To hide his shame, the king had a Labyrinth constructed in which to hide the monster. He then forced the Athenians to send as tribute fourteen young men and women to be locked in the Labyrinth for the Minotaur to eat. To stop the slaughter, the hero Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth and fight the monster. On the advice of the kings daughter, Ariadne, Theseus brought a ball of thread, which he unwound as he went through. He found the Minotaur, killed it, and then used the thread to find his way out of the maze.

Through this myth Ariadne understands that she is here to live consciously the adventure of self-discovery. In the myth Ariadne was a virgin, symbolizing how we must purify our emotions. She must help Theseus, or her intellect, to come out of the labyrinth of form where the Minotaur lives. The labyrinth symbolizes how easy it is to get lost amidst so many wrong ideas. The Minotaur represents the false consciousness of mankind, which is erroneous because our senses fool us. Just as we once believed the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around it, we continue to hold erroneous believes based on what we see or feel with our senses and our animal instincts. We feel more comfortable believing things as we know them than trying to expand our knowledge. That is why Galileo and Copernicus were persecuted for bringing us new knowledge. In the same way, our reactions of today, are not very different from our prehistoric reactions to life. We have a series of comfortable believes, or taboos, that only a minority in each generation dare to challenge. This is why the emphasis in this book is not on the personality of the character Ariadne, but on the Ideas that come to her by the magnet of the questions she asks. Ideas that help her realize we are not what we think we are. We are not the limitations of our body, or our intellect, or our emotions. The way we have interpreted who we are is wrong, as wrong as how we once perceived the nature of the Earth and the universe to be.

Ariadne retells our history to her daughter from this perspective, showing her how we have struggled to emancipate ourselves from the erroneous interpretations of ourselves and of our world made by a dependence on our senses. Ariadne is helped in her search by the golden thread of humanist thinkers who have told us time and time again that our problem lies in our exclusive identification with what we can see and touch.

Beyond the Homo Sapiens is also an analysis of the idealistic radical thought that began with the Egyptian Hermetic movement and which, century after century, has tried to change our erroneous interpretations for correct ones. It recounts those things we must know to be able to separate the gold of history from the fools gold of our misconceptions; the humanist ideas, from the inhuman ones; the Spiritual in us, from the untamed animal automatism that still rules our psyche.

The thesis of the book is that history represents the task of reversing all the misinterpretations of prehistory. Through science we have already achieved the reversal of the misconceptions of the objective world. We now need to do the same with those of the subjective world. As Ariadne narrates history to her daughter, she formulates a way to accomplish this.

First, we must clear our psyche. Kabala, Alchemy, and Yoga know that the psyche consists of three levels: intellect-feelings-energy. We must clear them from all wrong thinking and feeling to liberate the energy encased in those wrong molds. Only in this way, will we be able to become more receptive to Spirit, establishing a permanent connection between the individual and Spirit. This task cannot be realized by one individual in one life time. It can only be accomplished by the race as it enters the phase of conscious evolution.

At its core, Beyond the Homo Sapiens is really a study on consciousness. Ariadne’s search leads her to the conclusion that the universe of matter is the external manifestation of a universe of Consciousness. Evolution is the result of the slow refinement of matter’s ability to express its inner Consciousness. From the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to the Homo Sapiens, from the Homo Sapiens to the Homo Spiritus, we are destined to reach towards Cosmic Consciousness like a child reaches for its parent. To us, Cosmic Consciousness can be related to as our Supraconsciousness. Subconsciousness is memory, the part of consciousness in which all experience–from the Cosmic and individual, to the pre-historic and modern–resides. The laws of Nature are the part of it that makes up the accumulated experience of the universe, built into automatic behavior.

Consciousness in the planet has grown painfully from the brut stone of total ignorance. Therefore, the Homo Sapiens carries within himself (in his Subconscious memories) the tendency for the inertia of the stone, the sensitivity of the plant, the instinct of self defense of the animal, and the burden of every erroneous opinion we believed in since first stood on two feet. All these evolutionary layers constitute the “archeology of the psyche” of modern man. Each one of us is a part of this stream of evolution. To live in the present we have to achieve the conscious recognition of all these unconscious layers or “habit patterns” of our species. Some of them are healthy, others interfere with our growth and progress.

Those of Ariadne's generation, born after the Second World War years, grew up in atomic shock, between an iron wall and a sword, facing the greatest emergency in history. Facing the threat of nuclear destruction and the menace of ecological disaster. Did her generation need to witness the agony of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to unleash the energy of the atom and reverse the creative force of Spirit, before they could turn their power towards constructive goals? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wake-up call for all of those in her generation who wanted to save themselves from imminent destruction. The past, with its inhumane precedent, could not give them the creative power they needed to imagine a new man and a new society. Their common history was bathed in blood. Her generation did not have to look too far back to conclude, as the philosophers had, that they did not have to ask what the source of evil is because it is in us. We can easily see that we have not taken the first step towards real Love or the Resurrection of the Human Spirit.

All through the book Ariadne points out the actions and opinions that throughout history have belonged to animal automatism, as well as the Ideas that belong to the Human Spirit in all of us. And, as Ariadne talks to her daughter, she makes continuous references to the present and how that history affects us to this day. She demonstrates the struggle between the will of Spirit for the redemption of the masses, and the will of elite’s to usurp the power of Spirit by imposing their own. How the blind masses follow blind leaders because both have the same inverted value system that puts matter and material gain before Spirit

This book is for those people who are tying to find their way out of the labyrinth, out of the confusion in our psyche and our society. The Homo Sapiens is the missing link between the animal and the human. The human is the link between the Homo Sapiens and the Homo Spiritus, who represents our evolutionary destiny.

Beyond the Homo Sapiens consists of 20 chapters divided in three acts. The three acts are 1107 pages long and narrate only the history that is essential to demonstrating how mankind’s contradictory nature has brought us to this pivotal moment in time. Part of mankind has striven for Truth, while our animal instincts keep us in the shadows of misconceptions, greed and fear. The book shows how the progressive Ideas of Truth manage to inch their way forward despite always being pushed back by the prehistoric taboos that live in us all. The triumph of the Human Spirit can bring us out of the labyrinth of animal instinct.

The Homo Sapiens’ intellect leans towards specialization, paying attention to one discipline or another and keeping the desire for wholeness at bay. In this way, the languages of culture–mysticism, philosophy, science, literature and the plastic arts–are divorced from one another, rather than being looked at as one whole expression of the Human Spirit. Interdisciplinary efforts, therefore, have been negligible. Even history does not afford us a holistic view of where we have been. Consciousness, on the other hand, has no limitations. It’s thread leads through all ages and disciplines. As each individual reads this book, he/she has to be open to the idea that the different disciplines are expressions of his/her own yearnings to become whole; that history needs to show the interrelatedness of time and space if we are to achieve a real understanding of it. The integration of all these different disciplines to our individual psyche is an important step forward in our path toward a planetary consciousness and beyond the Homo Sapiens.

Synopsis | Outline | Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2