Most people would agree that, in the pursuit of happiness, simple materialism is not enough. Some people would even say that the pursuit of material possessions is even an impediment to real happiness. What do such people mean by “real happiness?” In any case many rich people are not happy.

What else is needed? Personal relationships, and love certainly, everyone needs those things to be happy. But all too often our personal relationships go bad. The offices of therapists and marriage councilors are full. Is it mental health that we lack in the pursuit of happiness? If so how did we become so neurotic?

Often our society is decried for its lack of “spirituality.” Does that mean that only church- goers can expect to be happy? But plenty of those people in the therapist’s office attend church.

Recently a number of psychologists such as James Hillman and Thomas Moore have talked about “the soul” or “spirituality” not in terms of religion but as a natural part of the human psyche. They describe the soul and the care of it in very subjective even “spiritual” terms but never tell us what it is. You have to just “get it” – all well and good if you do but the rest are left wondering and maybe, quite reasonably, more than a little skeptical.

Let us assume that there is something to this “soul” business and see if we can track it down without being totally subjective or resorting to religion. This will require us to do a little reverse-engineering of the human psychology and to do this we will have to go back down the evolutionary timeline. Consider the point prior to the emergence of the intellect where our ancestors lived as part of the natural environment more or less the same as other “sentient” animals such as apes or horses.

We find a species of social animals that have complex personal interactions. They have family groups and extended clans, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing. We see patterns of behavior conducive to hunters and gathers governed by a rich set of emotional responses to the sensed environment.

Move forward on the timeline and the neocortex evolves in humans but not so much in other species. With this comes the intellect, the capability to make abstract concepts about the world that go far beyond what is directly sensed and eventually language. But evolution is not an intelligent designer. It only can add on to what is already there not start over from scratch.

This means that the rich matrix of emotional responses that evolved to directly motivate us by giving us strong attractions or aversions to the natural things we perceived through our senses remains intact in our brains today unchanged by the advert of the intellect.

Thus we actually have two major aspects of our psychology, sapience and sentience, that work very differently from each other. The older one feels, the newer one thinks. The heart and the mind if you will. The soul and the intellect. Heart, soul, same thing and as objectively real as any other part of us.

The Dali Lama once said, “You Westerners are very good at developing the mind but not so good at developing the heart.” It is exactly this, developing the heart that psychologists like Thomas Moore mean by “care of the soul.” But why does developing the heart turn out to be so much more difficult than developing the mind?

To begin with the operation of the soul is mostly unconscious, we only know it when its products which are our emotional or spiritual experience intrude into our consciousness (or in dreams). The intellect on the other hand is our consciousness.

The problem though is even more complex and much more subtle. Our emotional responses evolved so that they would be stimulated by the things we perceived in a natural environment not in civilization. Like any other part us, our sentient mind, our heart, loses its sensitivity when it doesn’t get the stimulation it needs.

So the solution to happiness is easy, get rid of civilization. Many have suggested that and it is that sentiment that is behind every “back to nature” movement or the popular romanticization of primitive societies. But the fact is, very few people when given the choice would choose to live the totally natural life. Life in nature may be spiritually pure but it is hard and by and large most people would far rather have to spend time on the therapist’s couch than see their children be eaten by cave bears.

How did civilization happen and so get in the way of our natural emotional predilections? It appears to have been an accident of evolution rather than a product of it. Humankind did not evolve to build skyscrapers the way beavers evolved to build damns.

The intellect and its ability to create sophisticated abstract concepts of nature and its underlying structures evolved to permit us to be better at getting the objects of our sentient mind’s desires or avoiding its’ aversions. Up until rather rather recently, say a 100,000 years ago or so, even though our neocortex and basic intellectual capabilities were basically identical with what they are now we lived as very, very clever apes nothing more.

Then something extraordinary happened. Language was invented. Now we could share our abstract knowledge of the world and the power of the individual mind could be added to the mind of anyone we could talk with. We had been smart but totally ignorant, now we could teach and learn.

Then about 6000 thousand years ago a second great invention happened. Written language. Now the power of mind added to mind could be extended to people not in proximity to each other and even more to the point, across generations. The accumulation of human knowledge exploded and civilization was born.

What happened to our hearts or souls through all this? Consider the very, very smart ape-human, 200,000 years ago. He or she sees an attractive looking fruit hanging from a high branch and devises tools and stratagems to reach it. If it doesn’t taste good it is spit out and that mistake is not made again. No much angst in that.

Fast-forward to a suburb of Babylon, 4000 BC, similar fruit, similar human. It looks every bit as attractive as before. But wait, “Is this a wild fruit tree or in an orchard? Is the owner around? What is the penalty for stealing fruit these days? Cutting off the right hand, I think – past it by.” Considerable angst and hunger too.

Fast-forward to a suburb of New York, 2010. Consider a Big Mac. The old sentient mind would not even recognize that it was looking at something edible but experience has taught it that it tastes good – maybe better than anything in nature. But the intellect: “That roll is all white bread, the worst kind of carb and the meat is high in fat and cholesterol, and I have heard they treat the cows it come from quite horribly, and what is in that Special Sauce anyway?”

Angst piled on angst not to mention that the original sensibilities of what food is, have been remapped by the intellect into something quite foreign from the built-in program of the sentient mind.

More important and much more problematical, our interpersonal relationships have also been re-mapped by the intellect from their original simple and pure archetypes. Father, mother, brother, sister, mate, friend, enemy have been amalgamated into the array of complex interpersonal relationships required to support civilization. It is no wonder our personal relationships become confused.

When we left nature our hearts, our souls, have become aliens on our own planet.

Note: This was originally posted on my Novus Atlantis site but I think it is better here.