We humans are animals.
More precisely, primate mammals. We’re closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we share about 99% of our DNA. Yet religions would have us wrongly believe that we are special, made in God’s image, the top of creation — as an Eastern religion I used to belong to would put it.
This fantasy that we’re somehow separate and distinct from other animals leads to all sorts of problems.
For example, we may feel that death doesn’t apply to us, because we have an immortal soul, or God will save us if we obey certain commandments. Another example is that if someone considers that they are supposed to rise above crude animalistic urges, they’re going to view those urges as sins, moral shortcomings to be repressed or eradicated.
The Eastern religion I mentioned (Radha Soami Satsang Beas, or RSSB) taught that lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism were Five Deadly Foes that RSSB initiates were supposed to battle against.
Yet this makes no sense from a naturalistic perspective.
Without lust, a lack of sexual attraction would go against the need to have children in order for our species to carry on. Without anger, we’d be handicapped when an attacker threatened us or our “tribe.” Without greed, we’d be less motivated to work hard to be able to acquire things. Without attachment, our social connections would be easily broken. Without egotism, we’d lack the confidence to perform difficult tasks.
Sure, everything is bad when taken to extremes. Water is necessary for life; drinking too much water can kill you. Likewise, excessive lust, anger, greed, attachment, and egotism can be detrimental.
But so can a lack of these natural human characteristics.
In the June 6, 2026 issue of New Scientist there’s an interview with biological anthropologist Alice Roberts called “The Human Paradox.” Heres a couple of the questions and answers.
How should we think about our bodies as products of evolution, about our history being written in our skeletons and our organs?
There’s biochemistry going on in our cells that goes back to these earliest single-celled creatures living in the ancient oceans. If we look at our arms and legs, they go back about 360 million years, when the first amphibians crawl onto land, and fins have become limbs. We can see that change, map the bones of our arm, and see where they’ve come from in evolutionary terms. You can do that with every part of the body.
Overall, where is our relationship with nature? What should that be?
There are billions of us. Our culture is exceptional. But by taking this evolutionary approach, you’ve got less of a hard line between the rest of the natural world and us, you can see where this culture has actually come from, even if it makes us feel completely separate.
Today, it’s important to remember we’re not separate. I don’t believe in any supernatural phenomena. I don’t believe in any divinity. Another way of framing that is, I think nature is enough, and for me as a humanist, I draw quite a strong moral lesson from the knowledge that I am part of the natural world, that all those other species out there are close cousins, that what evolution has conferred on me is this incredible intelligence and understanding.
We understand the impacts we’re having. When we have a deleterious impact — even if it’s not happening immediately — we understand that by virtue of the lifestyles we’re living, we are impacting negatively on biodiversity. Morally, we need to limit that impact. Because however insulated we feel from the natural world, we’re part of it. If that disappears, we’re not going to be here very long.
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Alice Roberts seems to believe that: “We understand the impacts we’re having. When we have a deleterious impact — even if it’s not happening immediately — we understand that by virtue of the lifestyles we’re living, we are impacting negatively on biodiversity.” I don’t know if we do realise the impacts. Though this is no doubt true with those who have studied the science and with those who are aware of our impact, just like the images of starving people somewhere in the world, we don’t really feel the connection.
With nature, we have a similar disconnection. It would seem that we are suffering a type of mental dissociation from the natural world. It’s as though we have no connection to the world of plants and animals. Nature, our reliance on and connections to it, rarely elicits a thought – until, that is, it hits us personally with unusual cold, hot, or wet weather, causing catastrophic floods. For this, we blame everything and everyone else rather than taking responsibility for how we treat nature and the planet.
If we really understood our effects on nature, on the planet, then we would elect and demand world leaders to adopt sustainable ways of living, along with acknowledging the interdependence with us, the environment and wildlife. Right now, it’s all to do with a reluctance to change our way of living. We still strive to acquire more, to do better than our neighbours – whether in our street or in other countries. And, sadly, we are still electing leaders that will do that for us.
I would think that until it ‘hits home ’-as when the time comes that farms cannot produce enough food: the air is too foul to breathe: fish stocks become depleted: warming seas adversely affect the weather – and, until the rich countries start to feel the effects on their way of life, will things change. But, sadly, I can’t see a change coming. Even when it becomes obvious that our survival is under threat, many will still believe otherwise and ignore it to the end.
True but don’t get addicted to that feeling.
Lust, Anger, Greed, Attachment and Pride are indeed part of this body, and most certainly cloud our thinking. They correlate well to the lower brain drives for feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction: the four “F” s of life. As lower brain functions, blindly following them in this modern society can be both dysfunctional and destructive. It happens every day.
These drives bias our thinking so that even when things are in balance we want more. And that harms other people. We want that Tesla even knowing the guy who makes them has done things that are leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of children. These lower brain drives don’t care. They are biochemical, and in excess they become addictive. Psychological addiction is a drug, a biological one.
The lower brain drives aren’t in balance. They have no mechanism for balance. The environment once provided that balance, social conventions once did so, but no more. And they aren’t entirely under our control either.
For balance the same brain has higher executive functions, even the capacity in deep meditation to withdraw from the lower brain functions altogether. The lower brain chemicals, unrestrained, become addictive and are further fed by behavioral addiction. Psychological addiction is a drug, a biological one.
These other higher and deeper brain mechanisms that help us find balance, once called simply the relaxation response, are deeply tied to withdrawing from senses, either through simple focus on internal (meditation) or external (mindfulness) objects.
Simply becoming aware of our breathing, observing it, moves us away from blind reactivity to becoming observers of this body and its reactions. And that distance from the lower brain drives, which mindfulness and meditation create, brings us both balance, peace, objectivity, insight and inspiration.
Spiritual meditation brings us in touch with the universal life, the Spirit, for lack of a better term, that we all share. The experience of that spirit is an experience of liberation from all that burdens us and a rebirth into pure joy, pure communion. It is a powerful basis for respect for all life, and a deeper effort to do no harm. Yes we are physical beings, but the experience of Spirit goes beyond experiencing our connections. We are more than connected to other creatures. We are more than brothers, sisters and every shade between; We are all part of the same One!
Spence. Talk of ‘lower brain drives’ is part of the old thinking that we have three brains: a lower brain (a lizard instinctual brain); a middle brain (mammalian emotional brain); a higher brain (human rational brain).
“The triune brain idea is one of the most successful and widespread errors of all science. But human brains don’t work that way. Bad behaviour doesn’t’ come from ancient and unbridled inner beasts. Good behaviour is not the result of rationality. And rationality and emotion are not at war . . . they do not even live in separate parts of the brain.” From ‘How Emotions are Made’. (Lisa Fieldman Barrett).
So, it’s incorrect to talk of ‘higher and deeper brain mechanisms’, ‘lower brain drives’ etc. It’s all one brain, not three. Basically, the brain is a network. There is no separate observer to modify behaviour; it’s all part of the experience/memory networking of the brain. So, there is ‘no distance from the lower brain drives’ – which has nothing to do with meditation. And there is no place (as far as I understand) for the inclusion of something called ‘spirit’. The brain/body organism works perfectly well without any imagined spirit or universal life idea.
Hi Ron E.
Barrett’s work is the mainstream position today and is a huge leap forward.
it isn’t quite as black and white as some in the general public have taken it. Nor is it a rejection of past research, only how that was interpreted in past theory, specifically the theory of “instinctual” behavior.
Her work is an additional understanding that what we see, feel, remember, and think are largely coded information by the brain and its conditioning.
Barrett nails it when she claims Instinct never carries into behavior without involving all the areas of the brain. But that experience is tempered by what centers the brain budgets energy to. And therefore two different people may indeed experience different things in a similar environment.
You can indeed say there are lower and higher brain centers, but they never function alone. Their hierarchy, if anything, has been demonstrated to be more complex and integrated than was earlier thought. They work together always.
Different parts of the brain are indeed active during different activities, as I wrote above.
For example fMRI scans during aggression show radically different centers of brain activity than when in deep meditation.
Aggression MRI research
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.475895v1.full
Meditation MRI research
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2816391/
Where Barrett make her many substantial contributions is in her model of how it all works together: all the parts are active, but in different areas of focus, and even these biochemical changes are interpreted as the experience we have. It is all coded before we see, hear or feel it by this prison house we live in. You don’t decide what to feel, but your brain does. And first, before you know it. That is from a learned recipe.
We learn to label some things as threats, others as pleasure. But it is also the case that there are definable patterns: Different parts of the brain do indeed function differently, but as a wholistic integrated system.
And that is where deep meditation comes into play.
When we are no longer aware of our physical senses, this is sensory gating, or de-afferentation. When we become aware of different experiences, internal ones in meditation, different parts of the brain are turned down and other parts we don’t often use are activated. And so we experience different things as that process continues and develops. This actually fits in elegantly with Barrett’s model of brain budgeting. We don’t experience what we aren’t using. That gets no energy. But what we attend to does. And we can open up new centers of experience through persistence in meditation practice.
So if we cite Barrett we need to go the whole way, where she discusses unique recipes of code for how the brain budgeting uses different parts in combination for different things. Yes, they are a network, but the recipe still relies upon those different brain centers, only in combination.
During aggression, yes the amygdala is much more active, and in deep meditation the prefrontal cortex is much more active. In fact the prefrontal cortex of long term meditators is physically different than non-meditators. So, of course their experience of reality is going to be different.
Where Barrett moves the classic model forward in leaps is not actually saying that the brain doesn’t have different centers of activity that generate different chemicals. What she has added is that one center doesn’t take over the others. And our experience isn’t just what one center does, but how the brain codes that stimulus from all the centers as a recipe for the experience.
We don’t have an animal brain in conflict with a higher brain. We have brain centers more active during fight and flight, feeding and reproduction (Amygdala, Lymbic network) and others more active during thinking and meditation (prefrontal cortex), but they are always coordinating with one another.
If there is a conflict, it is in facing our own conditioning when we wish it were different.
These centers are under the same general management, and they generate, in combination, a result that is interpreted through a learned or conditioned pattern or recipe as your experience of one emotion or another , even addiction, even sensory experience. You interpret a sensation as an irresistible craving, as anger, as peace, as joy, as God, etc.
So yes, spirituality is, for many, a biochemical recipe yielding an experience entirely equal, perhaps greater, than lust, and, greed, attachment and pride, and those biochemical recipes. Just as we see the experiences our brain codes in all things, that includes all sorts of experiences depending upon the mix of active brain centers. You cannot say that your experience is legitimate and mine is not simply because your brain or mine function in a different mix of activity. But you can say, and Barrett’s model supports this, that your experience can indeed be legitimately different, even unique.
Spiritual meditation can get you there.
A couple of refinements to what I wrote, Ron, as I read it again, and spot my outdated classic training as an experimental psychologist…
Since these brain centers do not predominate one another a better term in place of “hierarchy” would be deep centers and surface centers..Barrett doesn’t like the hierarchical terminology. Second, the coding isn’t just experience but predictive experience. We experience what our brain is predicting is happening. Nice when meditation helps put that aside and view it a little more objectively.
Spence. Glad you agree with my brief comment (and with Barrett). Yes, it’s biology all the way in that the total organism runs the show, with thoughts that arise unbidden, giving the impression that there is a ‘me’ of sorts that’s doing the thinking.
No ‘me’ claiming to be meditating, just meditation arising – all by courtesy of the great illusion our body/brain organism performs constantly. No ‘me’ needed – unless thought conjours one up.
So when it all drops away, there is just this, right here, right now – to coin a phrase!
Hi Ron!
Everyone experiences things a little differently. And they use language differently. To use language is to create labels and boxes. And for some, those labels fit perfectly. The idea that “I am sitting here experiencing sound and light” actually gets in the way of experiencing it. But it’s not bad to know what’s happening..helps memory later. We forget a lot of things we experience. And it doesn’t matter, except to have a discussion later. Then what’s happening and how we experience it are important.
The hear and now, Barrett will tell you, was a split second ago, and you only went where your attention placed you. Even the hear and now is an illusion manufactured by mind.
In your world, nothing is supernatural.
In my world, everything is.
In your world, things make sense and can easily be explained.
In my world, nothing can be satisfactorily explained. It’s both awesome and entirely confusing. And the more I see, the more complex it gets, the less I understand.
I would like to say that in deep meditation, your attention is your vehicle, and what you contemplate, you approach and see in ever greater detail, until there is so much it can’t be understood. You quickly get to the place where thoughts are outstriped by awareness. Is that hear and now? It’s something.
Is that supernatural? Everything we don’t understand yet is “supernatural” because we label what we know as “natural” and what we don’t know or fully understand as “beyond natural”…Our understanding is the barrier and the basis for dichotimous thinking. Science teaches us two things. First, nothing is supernatural. We don’t live in two creations. But we understand it in layers and from different brain recipes. And in that way you and I may be living in two different dimensions, or slipping between a much larger number moment by moment.
Second, everything has far more complexity in it than we can imagine. To say “I don’t need to know more” is fine, until you are confronted with something entirely new. Then you can invent a comfortable answer, or you can close the door, or you can just sit and watch and say “Wow…don’t know what that really is, but it’s damn cool!”
So why is there such joy in seeing the unknown? What can’t really be labelled? Ask any scientist. I am very impressed with what Barrett has done, to show the manufactured reality everyone is living it.
We just get habituated to it, and think there is solidity to it. But there isn’t.
We live in different worlds.
Spence. Just one last comment from me on this subject. You remarked:
“In your world, nothing is supernatural.
In my world, everything is.”
“In your world, things make sense and can easily be explained.”
And: “We live in different worlds.”
Yes, in my world, the natural world we all inhabit, everything is natural. This is your world also. The only difference being that you (for your own reasons – and that’s fine) introduce into the natural world thought-created ideas, beliefs and inferences.
Yes, my world is the natural world. I would avoid using the term supernatural, as nothing is superior to nature, to the physical world. The best I can come up with (rather than spiritual, another misused term) is that for me the world is sublime, a world that exists, that can be sensed, but not necessarily explained – and that’s fine. With that being so, I am quite happy to exist in this natural world, to live and to die – like every other life form.
Hi Ron
Every belief system is sacred to those who hold it, each for their own reasons.
What is sacred to you, what you believe superior comes from your own experience.
For me, no system of belief isn’t sacred. Weren’t they all shaped by evolution? Here they all are, each in their place, within one or many.
But my experience has shaped a strong preference for a system of belief that honors the others, and does not need to compare them or evaluate them, though internal comparisons within the system are part and parcel of Vivek and progress.
Each system exists in is own universe.
The natural, the spiritual, the rational, the devout, God, physics.
They are, to me, a whole and cannot be separated.
But it’s all above my pay grade so I’m happy to enjoy all the different shades.
One more point Ron
The Inuit and Yupik have 40 words for snow. The Scottish, where weather changes rapidly and severely, have 421. The Sami in Scandinavia have 300.
Theologians of all faiths have thousands of words for God.
Why such a variety?
To the Pacific Island communities, they have one word for snow.
Snow doesn’t exist for them.
But water does.
They have hundreds of words for water.
As someone gains experience in these things they create language to reflect the different variants of that experience. What is natural for one may be entirely foreign to another.
Where there is no exposure to these things little or no language is created. There is no use for it.
To a deep meditator the experience of the Holy Word is life changing, and itself changes form as they make inner progress. Their experiences are reliable, so language is important to those involved in that work. And naturally they are going to have a lot to say about it.
Those not involved in that work have little use for such terms. It isn’t real to them. That is their experience, their own separate world.
It’s not a matter of real or unreal when such reports are consistent down through all recorded history, right from the earliest writings. It is a matter of what is part of one’s own experience, and so what is natural to that person.
It is only a matter of what is real to the individual, and that is worthy of respect.
And so I would not feel right to tell the Inuits what snow really is. That have no meaning or use for my labels. I have no interest in painting over their culture with my biased view. They have their experience and language.
As Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) once wrote,
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
Exposure to these things broadens our view, naturally, especially when that travel is within, but also when we travel to different places and ideas through a broad education. It’s all a matter of open mindedness and interest. But where there is neither, still, respect can prevail.