Sometimes I think humanity is nothing more than baboons dressed appropriately. Anyone who has battled traffic on the 405 in LA or another big city would concur with this statement, but there are other ways of seeing it.
The Egyptians thought so much of the baboon archetype that they made it one of their gods. I remember visiting an Egyptian temple and seeing the iconography of a baboon thinking that was about right in terms of depicting humanity in animal terms.
The Egyptians worshipped Thoth, a god who was represented with the head of an Ibis and was the god of the moon, judgement, writing, science, hieroglyphics, wisdom, knowledge, magic and art. Ra was the chief god. He and his daughter had an argument, which inspired her to flee. Ra sent Thoth, who changed himself into a baboon, to seek her out and convince her to return home. After Thoth requested her to reconcile with her father a total of 1,077 times, she finally decided to return home.
That’s one stubborn woman. It took baboon sensibilities to win out the day. The story demonstrates one of persistence, humility, and cunning for which he (Thoth) was richly rewarded with the female consort Nehemtawy. Thoth is the guardian of the dead in the underworld.
Cue David Attenborough. Baboons awake around 7am in the morning. They forage for food, rest, groom, eat, play and at night go to sleep only to wake up and do it all over again. Like baboons, we let other baboons jump around and amuse us. We blush, smile, take it in and move on with our days; eating, drinking, farting, working for food and loving – not necessarily in that order.
Like Baboons, humans are big into using sticks and intimidation tactics to protect our territory and maybe use them as weapons to get a little more. We’ve just figured out more fashionable ways of doing it. Some humans have mastered computers, others have mastered technology and science in ways that meets the demand for survival. Others have mastered the art of weaponry to defend our troops and our domain.
Like baboons, we’re hellbent on causing a ruckus and disturbing the peace in our quest to satisfy the senses. I recently witnessed the film “The Insurrectionist Next Door” by Alexandra Pelosi and her film footage of the storming of the Capitol on January 6th to overturn the presidential election. Americans know the story, the head baboon, Donald Trump, ordered his troops of baboons to seek out the legislative baboons that were formally certifying the election of our new chief of baboons, Joe Biden.
The movie is very telling. Wow, what a demonstration of the most basic animal insincts within us. People trooping in and claiming territory as their own, defecating and urinating on the floors, making themselves at home to the spoils of victory drinking their opposition’s wine and eating their food, jumping up and down in offices and destroying property and seeking out the head baboons responsible for their plight in life. Many of the people who stormed weren’t thinking through why they were doing what they were doing. They were just caught up in the act and responding to stimuli.
One can only imagine the psychology of such interlopers and spend a lifetime examining why someone would go to such lengths to make their points. I guess it begins within the family and a lack of love in the home. A baboon parent is traumatized by the act of survival, suffers a series of indignities which leads to other indignities and suffering and passes treatments along in his or her own strange manners and such indecency plants itself like a seed in the heart.
Some of us baboons can’t move beyond our barbaric tendencies. We dress nice and go to church, but the pathos that has settled in from years of responding rather than healing has rendered us captive to the psychological manias inspired by culture. We respond rather than think, we conceal our true intentions and live duplicitous lives, we align ourselves with tribal thinking and have surrendered to what is reasonable.
We see a pretty baboon that tickles our fancy and want to make our own, we’ll do anything to get it. We jump up and down on our branches when we’ve claimed them as one of us. I heard about a baboon who was willing to give up his children to be with a pretty one. Consider that. Your own flesh blood! My studies of baboons indicates that baboons have a close affinity for attending to their progeny, so I’ll give one point for baboons above humans on that one. But what does that say about the science of stimuli that captures you and the value of endorphins in allowing endorphins to rise above reason?
I know, some will read this and say, that’s not me, I’m not a baboon. But I submit, how much control did you have over your last craving? How willing are you to give up chocolate or your favorite treat in the name of rising above the senses. Score another one for baboon mentality.
I get it, you might say even baboons deserve a tasty berry or foraged delight to relish the senses in the act of being alive. There’s nothing wrong with being a baboon if you’re not hurting anyone and going about your business. The chances of that happening in our culture are slim to none, though. We can’t seem to resist living in extremes. We hurt one another. We ostracize others we don’t feel fit our baboon culture. We buy expensive things sometimes at the risk of providing for our own kin. Score another one for the elevated state of baboons. They, at least, attend to the needs of their young.
Every now and then a baboon comes along with an elevated state of consciousness who wants to change things up and challenge the system. What do we do? We kill it and offer it up as a scapegoat for the rest of the baboons, and we say, please continue doing what you were doing in your baboonish ways. We can’t seem to learn from history or the prophets who went before us and warn us not to act like baboons.
Our nonverbals and use of language help us creatively rationalize our baboon ways, but we’re still baboons at heart. As I’m writing this, I wonder if I’m being offensive to baboons, because it seems that they rise above certain things better than humans. Sure, we can communicate more efficiently than animals, but where does that leave us? We still need to eat.
I was watching tv and on came a couple of baboons making out on a beach. They were wearing little and next to nothing. “Baboons in Paradise.” I shook my head. “Baboons,” I thought to myself, but they’re living their best baboon lives.
There’s a guy who posts babies sucking on the breast of the mother. “Baboons,” I thought to myself, “we’re all just sucking from the breast of the earth the best we can.” I was in the presence of a little baby. The baby smiled and cooed and her presence changed something in me. She was a little bundle of spirit. I thought to myself, “maybe, just maybe, this little one will show us and help us evolve out of our baboon ways and change the world for the better.” Then I thought, give her a little taste of life and she’ll evolve into a real baboon in no time.
spirit beat 