According to Freud, humans are energy aggregations, and the personality is a closed system of limited energy.  Psychoanalytic theory holds that the amount of psychic energy within an individual personality is limited.  Therefore, the parts of that personality – the id, the ego and the superego – each try to gain control of the available energy at the expense of the other two.  This intrapsychic conflict and its ultimate winner determine human behavior.

Freud applies the old laws of the conservation of matter and energy, which hold that the respective amounts of matter and energy in a closed system are fixed and can neither be created nor destroyed, to the human personality. In chemistry, all changes in the state of a closed system are seen as involving a gain or loss of energy.  Freud believed that the impersonal forces envisioned by the mechanistic worldview dictated, and in a sense, enslaved, human choice.  His view was deterministic.

The ancient law of lack has its modern expression in the laws of the conversation of energy and matter.  In the physical world, there isn’t enough of what is needed for everyone to survive.  Resources are limited.  The conservation laws obviously reflect a closed system with fixed quantities.  The theory of evolution and natural selection recognizes this.  The organism must consume other beings in order to live.  To live, the organism must take.  It must take from others.  Human beings and all other species within the animal kingdom are classified biologically as heterotrophs.  A heterotroph is an organism that must eat other organisms.

We must therefore kill something else to survive. In this kind of world, we operate in a zero-sum game. In order for me to live, something else must die. In this world of limits, life must consume life in order to remain life. Something must therefore be assigned to die. We see a natural world filled with ferocious predators and their meek prey.  Lions cannibalize cubs.  Nestlings push other nestlings from the nest.  Parasites devour their hosts.

To the individual’s way of thinking then, it can have only if others have not.  The individual organism has concluded that it can only survive if others die. This is a barbaric principle indeed: that I am a hunter, a killer, a murderer. Most of us can’t live with that judgment of ourselves. Thus, in order to escape our own sense of barbarism, we project it onto the world. This grim but unspoken worldview has all kinds of consequences.

The world is a place where each self must be wary of every other self, that others do not steal from the self what the victimized self perceives that it has stolen from someone else.  In this way, selfishness and fear become habituated into the instincts of every creature. They are rationalized and assimilated into humans and their civilizations.  These instincts are, in a sense, codified into the theory that only the fittest organisms survive.  From a cosmological standpoint, the conservation laws have been written to reflect the belief in scarcity. The Second Law of Thermodynamics – which ratifies this sense of scarcity – holds that there is no ‘free lunch.’ For every expenditure of energy, a price must be paid. Order – be it physical, chemical, biological, or civilizational – requires energy to sustain it, and therefore every orderly system devolves into chaos. This entropic decay is inherent in every closed, structured system.  This only bolsters the claim that all things are limited.  The individual mind has harnessed the scientific worldview to legitimize aggression as required for survival.

We justify killing by classifying the life about us into a hierarchy of lower and higher orders. We cannot consume our own species or certain other “high order” species in order to gain metabolic energy. But we can eat lower forms of life in order to survive. We rationalize this consumption by breaking life up into degrees of value and consigning those lifeforms we deem of lesser value to death. Although human beings have decreed that there are “degrees” of life, there can be no degrees of death.

Yet let us not scapegoat the scientific worldview for what remains a more basic, more implicit human tendency to perceive the universe in parts rather than as a whole.  Millennia before the scientific revolution became the predominant worldview, humankind enshrined its belief in limits, a perception which it seems to share with the animal world from which humans arose.  The belief in limited resources, in finite supply, is founded upon a perception of the apartness of being.  If matter and energy and space are broken down into separate parts, then each part sees itself as limited and necessarily also sees each other part as finite.  This is the nature of closed systems, which are defined by their boundaries. Even love, the human universal need, is thought of as in short supply.  These are the laws of the world.

Complete awareness, on the other hand, is a unified, unifying concept.  A full awareness sees one whole rather than the whole fragmented into an infinite number of parts.  Seeing one whole, it knows the law of abundance, that there is enough of everything for everyone.  The law of abundance is a metaphysical axiom which arises once the idea of boundary is abandoned and the boundary of any closed system is no longer perceived.  It can be stated most simply as follows:  Abundance remains constant.  It is only the sources from which we have come to expect our energy that may change.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within