A healthy evolution in harmony with a natural life

Janov's Reflections      on the Human               Condition

Estranged From Nature and Evolution                        (Click to access!)

My comment:

A healthy evolution in harmony with a natural life.

It has taken me a long time fully to understand the Primal Principle. My trauma, which sometimes triggered epilepsy, meant an ever-present pain, quick to leak anxiety and fits. This was no good starting position if I wanted a career that was based on acquisition of theoretical knowledge. Instead my brain, chemically lobotomized from pain, developed an orgy of neurotic needs that propelled my continuos changes and my international adaption to new cultures. My childhood pals, with more subtle forms of suppressed pain, remained locally based, occupied in digging for knowledge building theoretical models.

Evolution in Reverse, I had to learn in several stages. At first, I dared, repeatedly to feel / relive the pain, that evolution had repressed in order for me to survive / endure my birth trauma and its consequences. Those experiences / primals, during a number of years, “normalized” my life pattern. I traded my constant neurotic changes for a new capacity that consisted of a fascinating remembrance of the dynamic process which I mentally had assimilated from Art’s treatment.

A calmer lifestyle that allowed intellectual (!) exercises and learning replaced my original ADD-tendencies. Now I also had, in addition to the ability, wordlessly, to feel my pain, ability to acquire knowledge to understand and express how my pain propelled life pattern had developed. Pain and anxiety disappeared eventually and neuroses, which were no longer needed, dissolved.

My picture of evolution has for several years been unclear. It has sometimes been great and overwhelming, like my childhoods father, which stressed me to overreact. On other occasions, I have found it easy to ignore evolution, as I did with the image of my self. The more peace I have with myself, and the more successfully I am able to see the connections in my overall life patterns, the more I realize that we are all part of the evolutionary process. Evolution can protect us, it can cure us, and it can destroy us if we ignore it.

Jan Johnsson