THE NATURAL FORM OF MAN pdf download

The Natural Form Of Man By Abdalhaqq Bewley

THE NATURAL FORM OF MAN

very baby born is an expression of absolute purity. Anyone present at birth must acknowledge this. Each new birth is bursting out of life itself.

Every baby is a container for the re-emergence of raw life energy — unadulterated, undifferentiated.

 However, this container has a definite form and comes into a specific environment. Each baby has genetic coding determining its physical shape and temperamental balance and each baby is born into surroundings of a particular nature both physical and emotional.

These circumstances, together with the chain of events that make up its early life, bring about the individualization of the new child.

They combine to make the child, in its unique way, begin to feel separate from its surroundings. Some receive affirmation and satisfaction and so view the world as a friendly, warm, safe place; others are negated and denied and so experience the world as hostile, alien, and threatening; and between these two are millions of possibilities and variations different for each child.

On the other hand, the kinds of human situations confronted by the child are quite limited and predictable, just as its specific temperament is of a given type, so that the result is a being both in every case unique and yet at the same time falling within a recognizable category, in just the way that, while no two individuals are sick in the same way, the particular illness they are both suffering from can still be diagnosed.

 At a certain point, after roughly two years, a picture built up of all the various elements mentioned above takes on a more or less definite shape and the child says, “This is me!” But this “me” is, in fact, by no means solid, but changing from one minute to the next, although it is established enough as a shape to be claimed as an identity.

 It is vitally important, however, to realize that this “identity” has no real existence in an absolute sense.

What has happened is that the pure life energy and undifferentiated consciousness of the newborn baby have, over some time and through exposure to a particular environment and together with its innate genetic coding, identified in a particular way with its body container and become limited and individualized in it.