Yeah, the path to enlightenment, is to realize your faults and work on them.
There’s many paths to enlightenment, admitting one’s faults and working on them is only one method. Asking questions and understanding how to learn is another.
No, some people like to think they’re ‘shaved apes in suites pretending we don’t come from a large tree of ancestors.’ Anyone with any degree of knowledge and understanding should realise that they’re not above nature, but apart of it.
we are 98% the same genetically as chimps. Maybe they think we are the stupid ones, and they
are just hanging out enjoying total inner peace?
I always wonder with this kind of a point; we as humans generally assume animals are at inner peace. Is it wrong to assume that it’s actually the opposite, animals in nature also have to battle internal problems just the same as many humans do? The only difference between humans and animals is the ability to put into legible words what they’re thinking at a certain time. I try to avoid the word ‘communicate’ in this instance because animals do communicate with each other in nature, both via body-language and through vocals albeit in a much more primitive way. How would a human tell if an animal is suffering internal conflict? I find with many species, especially those we keep as pets, we can learn a lot about our animals friends. Dogs will let you know when they’re in mourning, need food and people have even said they know they’re missing their companion. What we need to bare in mind is that the way we interpret our pet’s language is through translation which we have had to learn over an amount of time. The more we know our animals, the better our translations get to be. We can never tell, however, exactly what an animal is thinking, nor can we ever tell what another human being is thinking. We can get rough educated guesses, but never pinpoint accurate. How do we know, therefore, if animals do or do not suffer internal-conflict? How do we know some animals don’t (or do) desire greater things in life? If we take out human-language from the equation, how would we know humans have internal conflict?
Do animals in nature have it harder or easier than humans? Take the bear for example, they have to hunt down food and store it for the winter in order to survive through it. If there’s no food availabe, they’re simply buggered. Humans can arguably have it easier by outsourcing their food from another location and we have the capacity to do so. Bears don’t have this luxury. However, bears don’t have to earn a living in a society, they can play whenever they want and mate whenever they want. They do have to follow rules, but instead of societal rules they’re governed by nature herself. Realistically, the only rule for a bear is to stay away from predators and other bears except when looking for the opposite sex, stay out of competitors territory (where possible) and ensure they have enough food stored ready for winter. Humans have laws, societal norms, office-politics, work-politics and home-politics to contend with. We also have our own version of territories; the mapped borders.
Language has given us humans the gift of elaborate communication. If our vocal chords were the same as that of a dog, we’d probably be seriously restricted by our vocabulary at this point and the written language would unlikely have been formed. People say the wheel is man’s greatest invention, I wonder instead if it’s language itself? Language is also our curse. We create problems for ourselves that could easily be resolved. Many laws that people obey are written in language and obeyed that shouldn’t be for example. All of our inventions as a result of the ability to communicate ideas have both their fair share of good and bad in the world. The wheel has given us the ability to move vehicles forward, but it’s also cursed with causing untold deaths over the years on the simple basis people get run over, for example. Bearing this in mind, there’s a price for every asset (or curse) we’re given. What was the price of the written language?