Prime Path 71:
You Are Survival
I know you don't get this right now, so let me explain more fully.
Let's look at evolution again. You, Pilgrim, are a "top of the food chain" animal. You aren't the only one. If we set aside humans, then lions are at the top of their food chain. Elephants are at the top of their food chain. Hyenas. Gorillas. Chimpanzees. Dolphins. Whales. Baboons? Orangutans? I don't know, it doesn't matter.
There's something that these "top of the food chain" animals have in common (and many other animals as well): most of them compete with each other in elaborate, ritualized contests, in which the winner gains enhanced social status, by which is determined who is first in line for tribal rank, food, shelter, and, most significantly, mating partners. Often, these rituals are themselves life and death, but even to the degree that losing does not result in death or injury, it does result in a severe survival-based penalty: lower hierarchical social status, possible banishment from the tribe, and diminished access to food, shelter, and, most significantly, mating partners.
So, when I say "survival, and all that goes along with it", I include the elaborate, stylized, complex, ritualized "survival-based" contests that homo sapiens have developed over the millennia, in a fashion notably similar, although more complex and elaborate, to those in which our fellow primates engage. To this day, for us humans, these ritualized contests establish hierarchical social status in which the winner gets the most and best "stuff", and the best mating partners.
So, for you, at a fundamental and absolutely real level, survival is a lot more, and a lot other, than merely who lives and who dies. At the top of the food chain, as you are, survival is almost never about actual survival. Instead, it's about social status, and that is, it's about playing, and winning, an elaborate and deadly serious set of complex, inter-related games.
Who is at the top of the hierarchy? Who gets all the goodies? Who, in evolutionary effect, gets to survive? You play all of this like your life depends on it, out of your fundamental, primordial, default purpose: survival. For you, survival is the fundamental value, and the fundamental purpose, at a pre-conscious level.
You didn't choose this, and you didn't not choose this. You don't believe in this, and you don't disbelieve in this. You don't agree with this, and you don't disagree with this. You don't like this, and you don't dislike this.
You are this.
© Copyright 2023 SkyVillage LLC