2 The Uniqueness Of Human Beings
uniqueness will manifest itself on all the planes of human expression at the level of evolution reached collectively, and individually by everyone. This includes actions, emotions, affirmations of the wills in harmony or in opposition, projects and the involvements in them, judgments on one’s states and status and how they agree with one’s idea of oneself and of others. There is plenty of room for variance and therefore in living with others each individual stresses the personal traits and manages to adhere to some image of oneself. All this does not require our present social and cultural sophistication but may have been the rule of conduct from very early in the evolution of Man. The literature of a few thousand years ago confirms that and we can easily imagine that once awareness has been at work there were plenty of opportunities for comparison, for strife and for adjustments among the first humans. After a certain number of generations, enough of what awareness can reveal must have been at hand for our ancestors of fifty thousand years ago, to feel as much at home in their natural and social environments as we may do today. Indeed who can deny a high degree of perception, of virtual action, of aesthetic feelings, to the peoples who chose the caves of Altamira in northern Spain and those of Lascaux in the Perigord Noir of France, to execute their remarkable art around 20,000 years ago? We are still quite unable to imagine how prehistoric men lived and felt, just as we are unable to conceive of the conscious lives of our own babies, mainly because events of such periods cannot easily be recalled. But we are learning as we become more adept in the use of our awareness, to enter those vital periods of our evolution and understand how humans actually evolved. To be in the process of human evolution does not mean that we are in a process that makes us reach peaks, but only that the use of our time is capable of putting us face to face with ourselves and of expressing what we see in terms of change and transformation. The constant increase of our complexity leads us to become more and more sophisticated and slowly too, more able to describe ourselves as not ever being complete and finished. Only a few of the humans ever become aware of their own awareness to the point of staying with it and know themselves in these
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