When is the last time, if ever, you climbed a tree? As a boy I often stretched myself across the wide limbs of the bent mango tree in our backyard. Sometimes, I sneaked into the orchard of Bawri grandma and relished the half-ripe fruits right from the branch, while I perched atop the sprawling guava tree. I come from a village. I find the city-bred kids deprived of such adventures.
Most of the children are climbers, in a different way though, which is particularly true when they are toddlers. It’s horrifying for a parent to walk in and catch his or her two-year-old bouncing impishly atop the toilet tank, or in the middle of the kitchen table.
When my son was small I had to cut all the lowest limbs off the mango tree in our backyard, to keep him from repeatedly coming into the house with a variety of scrapes and bruises. I suppose it’s in response to the shock and dismay of our parents that we eventually learn to stop climbing. In fact, there is a ritual among the brahmins in which a boy takes a vow, during the bratopanayan (sacred thread ceremony) not to climb trees ! Yes, I wasn’t suppose to climb the tree in our backyard, though I often did anyway.
Why did you stop climbing trees? Did you simply lose interest? Or did you finally succumb to the concerns of your parents warning you not to climb too high because you might fall and get hurt?
I suppose it’s true, that we humans aren’t really cut out for climbing trees and moving from one tree to another. Our torsos are long and heavy compared to our short weak arms, making it difficult to repeatedly lift ourselves up. Nor are our spindly fingers and stubby toes suitable for grasping and clinging to limbs or vines. When it comes to primates, we humans are the most awkward lot of all ! Unlike so many of our primate cousins—lemurs, chimpanzees, orangutans, even bats—it’s difficult for us humans to get into the swing of things.
Isn't 'Primate' an interesting word ? It comes from the Latin word primus meaning "first" or "original." Perhaps this is why children, much closer to their origins than us adults, are such natural climbers. As we grow up and away from our original Self, our source, we lose our penchant for climbing. Of course, climbing is merely a metaphor for any kind of primate behavior. How many times have you been told in your life, "act your age! Quit monkeying around!" As we mature we’re expected to act less like the primates we are, and more like something else, which is difficult to determine since we are primates.
This move away from our origins is as much cultural as it is personal. Like primate, the word primitive also comes from the Latin word primus. Primitive cultures have often been frowned upon by modern folk as being uncivilized. This was certainly true among social reformers like Plato who wrote of the uncivilized in his Republic, or Aristotle in his Ethics, or St. Augustine in his City of God. But the word primitive itself didn’t enter into English usage until the 15th Century, when it meant "original." Again, there seems to be this idea that society can only mature if it moves away from it’s origins. Just a few years after Charles Darwin suggested we all evolved from apes, Herbert Spencer developed his idea that society also evolves, like a living organism, from a primitive state to a more advanced state. Whether we agree with Spencer or not, we all seem to have this idea that in order to advance, society must mover far beyond it’s primitive roots.
Today we all must recognize our own modern society was founded upon the brutal mistreatment of peoples considered primitive—specifically the tribals who once thrived in this land and eventually were so denuded by exploitation that we the aliens are now supposed to protect them.
In addition to the personal and cultural disdain for the primate and the primitive, there is a psychological disdain. Most of us have tried to replace our original Self with an analog self. This is the part of us that identifies too closely with our own thoughts, the part that says, "I think, therefore I am." I’m speaking of the ego, the part that says, "I." In this sense the ego becomes a parasite, borrowing the body, the feelings, the thoughts of its host, the original Self, while completely ignoring the notion that it’s only a guest in someone else’s home.
Another way to look at the ego is as the part of us that’s been forced to climb down out of the trees. As infants and children, as I’ve already stated, we are much closer to our original self, our primative self. We climb, we laugh, we cry, we rage, we relieve ourselves whenever it is natural for us to do so. In our desire to be loved and accepted, however, we eventually learn to meet the expectations of our parents, peers and culture. As a result we begin to repress the part of us the acts spontaneously, the part of us that is true to our original being. We repress our emotions because big boys don’t cry and good girls don’t talk back. Potty training, learning to cling and let go, has turned many of us into pissed off tight asses!
In her profound little book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychoanalyst, Alice Miller writes concerning the search for the true Self;
The idea behind psychology is that we are all in the process of coming to terms with our true Self, our original Self, our primitive Self, that has been repressed by our cultural indoctrination and our narcissistic need to be loved and accepted by those around us. It’s seems like such an irony that we must climb down out of the trees in order to be loved, when it’s really the part of us who climbs trees that wants to be loved.It is one of the turning points in analysis when the narcissistically disturbed patient comes to the emotional insight that all the love he has captured with so much effort and self-denial was not meant for him as he really was, that the admiration for his beauty and achievements was aimed at this beauty and these achievements, and not at the child himself. In analysis, the small and lonely child that is hidden behind his achievements wakes up and asks: "What would have happened if I had appeared before you, bad, ugly, angry jealous, lazy, dirty, smelly? Where would your love have been then? And I was all these things as well. Does this mean that it was not really me whom you loved, but only what I pretended to be? The well-behaved, reliable, empathic, understanding, and convenient child, who in fact was never a child at all? What became of my childhood? Have I not been cheated out of it? I can never return to it. I can never make up for it. From the beginning I have been a little adult. My abilities—were they simply misused?"
I’m making so much of tree climbing because it’s one of the primary characteristics that defines primates. Of course, the thing that really makes us primates is that we all share a common ancestor. There are nearly 200 living species, with another 100 known to be extinct. Even with all this variety, primates, for the most part, share some adaptive characteristics, which evolved, primarily, to assist us in climbing trees. One of those, as you may have already guessed, is opposability, the thumb, which allows us to grasp hold of objects, particularly important for tree climbing.
So next time you feel yourself trying to get a grip, whether on a tree limb, or on reality, remember this ability comes from your primate Self. It’s the original Self that allows us to grasp things, be it physical objects, or intellectual, philosophical and spiritual truths. We grasp because we’re originally tree climbers.
Another feature of primates is the clavicle, or collarbone. Evolution gave us this feature as a support between the shoulders and trunk of the body to help reduce muscle strain in a creature that, what else, is often suspended by its arms. It’s interesting that in Latin, the word clavis means "key," as if to say, our original Self is key to understanding who we truly are. Carl Jung once listed the key as a symbol of creative force. "The key," he writes, "unlocks the mysterious forbidden door behind which some wonderful thing awaits discovery."
The key is also a phallic symbol, naturally, because it is inserted to unlock creative forces. It seems we also have this persistent desire, this constant passion, to enter into mystery, physically symbolized by the sex act and the womb, in order to create something new—an offspring that symbolizes our own transformation into a new creature. This feature, once again, belongs to us primates. Unlike other creatures, with defined breeding seasons, female primates pass through a regularly recurring menstrual cycle, with a peaked sexual drive just prior to ovulation. Similarly, male higher primates are capable of breeding… well, wherever and whenever they can! In other words, we primates can go at it all the time! We are sexual round the clock, if, that is, we haven’t been shamed out of the trees, off the trunks and out of the bushes. We must also remember, our sexuality is a mirror of our creativity. Sex is a creative act, and creativity is part of our original being, our primitive Self. We owe all our creativity, all our poetry and song, as well as our inventiveness and modern technology to our primitive forbears swinging up there in the trees.
Closely akin to creativity among primates is our intelligence. The capacity for learning and problem solving is a primate characteristic. Perhaps this comes from those early primates juggling, grasping and examining objects in their opposable hands. According to evolution it was this opposability, along with the manipulative skills and muscular coordination necessary for moving through trees that evolved into the enlargement of the motor areas of the brain, subsequently leading to an increase in the primate brain size. In other words, even our intelligence comes from our origins in the trees.
Increased brain size, and the resulting increase in intelligence, isn’t the only neurological adaptation that came to us from our arboreal forbears. The development of large forward looking eyes is also a feature among primates. The optic nerve fibers of each eye extends to both halves of the brain. This provides us with superimposed vision, that is, with our depth perception. Indeed, unlike many other animals, vision has become so important to us primates that both our facial features and our brains have evolved around it. In addition to enlargement of the occipital lobe, the part of the brain responsible for sight, higher primates in particular have developed bony eye sockets to support and protect their eyes. Indeed, this is so important for us that we seem to have sacrificed our sense of smell for it. Smell is extremely important to most other animals. But in primates the olfactory portion of the brain has diminished in size, our muzzles have become small noses, and our faces have flattened.
Hence, in a very physical way, we have traded our sense of smell, which tells us which way the winds are blowing, of coming dangers, and of the direction we need to go, for depth perception. Another way to put it is, we want to make decisions for ourselves, based upon our own vision and depth. We primates are creatures not necessarily bound by our instinctive whims, but by the freedom to make our choices, our own decisions. We primates are visionaries and adepts.
One final characteristic worth mentioning is that all primates are social and that much of our behavior is learned behavior. That is, we learn from each other. You see, among primates, different groups of the same species are capable of demonstrating different talents and abilities, not necessarily typical of the species. We learn those talents and abilities from each other. Thus, no matter how far we think we have strayed from our primitive origins, we owe our very society to the fact we were once all tree climbers.
Unfortunately, as I have already stated, we humans have purposely tried to distance ourselves from our origins, personally, collectively and psychologically. And what have we lost in the process? Certainly, it can be argued, that our original Self, our true Self, is responsible for grasping, creativity, intelligence, vision, depth and culture itself. Thus, to turn away from our origins is to turn on the best part of who we are. What then is left? A soulless ego, a shallow parasite that must turn its world into an empty soulless thing, a mere object to be used, misused and discarded? Carl Jung once wrote;
This is what we lose when we kill off the primitive, the primate, the child in us. We lose the part of ourselves that experiences the world subjectively, as a place full of wonder and mystery. Jung often referred to psychic energy, that is, soul energy (psyche means "soul"), as libido. He wrote, "What we call the ‘blocking of libido’ is, for the primitive, a hard and concrete fact: his life ceases to flow, things lose their glamour, plants, animals, and [others] no longer prosper."[ibid.,170] This seems to best describe the condition we are in when we kill off the primitive in us, when we block up our soul force, our libido. The world and everything in it becomes a mere object. It loses it’s subjective importance to us.The naïve [person] of antiquity saw the sun as the great Father of heaven and earth, and the moon as the fruitful Mother. Everything had its demon, was animated like a human being, or like his brothers the animals… Even the sun’s disc was given wings or little feet to illustrate its motion. Thus arose a picture of the universe which was completely removed from reality, but which corresponded exactly to [humanity’s] subjective fantasies. It needs no very elaborate proof to show that children think in much the same way. They too animate their dolls and toys, and with imaginative children it is easy to see that they inhabit a world of marvels.
Even religion, which is supposed to be the ultimate subjective experience has become an object. In ancient times people used myth and story to help them comprehend their subjective experience. As Karen Armstrong points out in her book, A History of God, "The story was not a factual account of the physical origins of life upon earth, but was a deliberately symbolic attempt to suggest a great mystery and to release its sacred power." Much of today’s religion has become objective, and is, therefore, mistaken as literal and historical truth, because that’s the only kind of reality an objective perspective can accept. It is only in returning to our origins, our primate Self that we can once again make our experience subjective and alive. We can grasp and ponder our experience, experience an inner sense of depth and vision, and creatively transform ourselves and the world because of that humble primitive being we have learned to frown upon. Isn’t it better, instead, to let this parasite we call the ego, the central nervous system, begin to live in symbiosis with the original Self, that we might become not only conscious of the objective world, but aware of the life in all things, in all creatures, the life in squirrels and grass and rocks, and the life inside ourselves, the life that begins up there… in the trees.
Do not hesitate. When you meet a tree next
time, climb it.