OKAY DUDE, WHICH WILL IT BE?
 

Men have long professed that all of human behavior will be fully understood once it is conclusively determined whether the deciding factor in a man’s life is his 
heredity, or his environment;
do his genes make him act as he does,
or is it his external conditions?

There are logical arguments for either position, 
replete with supporting examples 
that can momentarily persuade any ordinary mind 
of the validity of its view.
Indeed, if you will look at the question 
exclusively from their perspective, 
the arguments of either camp can 
fully explain all of human behavior  --   either can! 
Either can --  either always has, 
and either will continue to do so, 
(and no one finds this interesting?!)

The arguments that can be made for either view,
and the endless examples available to support it, 
are so well known, and easily observed 
as to need no coverage here;
listening to such from either camp can cause any
ordinary man’s mind to agree with its position
of why men act as they do…… and yet --
after thousands of years of this debate -- 
still no one is satisfied with either explanation…
…and yet  --  one of the two possibilities must be the determining factor in making a man live his life in the
particular way he does;
it must be due to either what is inside of him --
the unique genetic make-up with which he was born,
and which directs his individual, instinctive responses to the external world,
or else genetically, everyone is basically the same, and each man’s behavior is controlled by the 
ever changing conditions of the external world;
one of the two MUST explain it!
As always, mind is generally confined to a binary view,
although there are those who clutch at the cloak of intellectual superiority by proposing that what is really involved is: “a little bit of one, and a little bit of the other,” to wit that heredity explains some aspects of 
man’s behavior, and his environment explains others,
and yet even this position has not proven satisfying. 

What is it that men do not see?
What needed insight is the mind missing that must be 
right in front of it?……well --
not quite, “right in front of it” --  it IS it.

Everything that lives is a doorway;
a passage between their insides and their outsides;
a conveyor and transformer of energy;
in, out;
out, in;
in, out;
out, in;
in, out.
Everything that lives is a doorway between 
their genes and their environment;
a passageway between their internal heredity, 
and the external conditions.
Man too is a two-way swinging door between his 
insides and his outsides, but also having mind,
he can ponder the activity passing through him,
and propose theories thereabout --
crippled ones --  but the theories keep a’comin’.
While on vacation a man decides to go on a diet;
after driving home non stop all night,
he arrives hungry, and discovers nothing in the house but peanut butter --   somethingnot on his new list of acceptable foodstuff.
How did the peanut butter get in his pantry?
What was the causative factor in his buying it --
his genetic make up,
or perhaps it was conditions at the store whereat
the treat was on sale at such a low pricethat
the bargain made it irresistible?
So - here he stands at three in the morning;
ravished with hunger; no near by store open;
what to do?
If he does, (in spite of his recent decision not to eat such food), succumb and partake thereof,
what was responsible for him doing so:
a weakness in his genetic construction,
or the power of the situation's conditions? 
If you want to see the answer to this captious puzzler
you have to stretch --  and keep stretched -- 
your mind in an unnaturally extended configuration
whereby you are not focused merely on the 
picture of the instant moment, but are reining in snippets of snapshots from both sides of a swinging door.
You have to hold in mind the question regarding whether  the peanut butter came to be in the house because of something in the man's genes, or because of something
in the conditions at the grocery store. 
But don’t stop there; consider further:
while he was on vacation, 
what caused him to decide to go on a diet:
did an instinctive, genetically-based inner voice tell him that his weight had become unhealthily excessive, or had he been hitting on a girl by the pool, and overheard her make a disparaging remark concerning his 
copious avoirdupois?
And if the latter: what made the young lady make such a comment: was it due to some inherited aversion she has to fatty physiques,
or perhaps it was because her friends had made fun of her even entertaining the overweight guy’s attention.
And what was responsible for her friends making
such remarks to her about the situation;
was it due to their inherited, genetic make up,
or because of certain experiences they have had 
in their own lives?
And how about the tubby guy’s mother:
while pregnant with him, did she gorge on such fattening foods as peanut butter, and thus thru her
freely chosen behavior, contribute to his propensity
to heftiness, or was she herself always overweight
due to unavoidable genetic factors with which she was born?   And  the conditions of her mother’s life; the genetics of her grandmother’s; both factors in his father’s, and grandfather’s lives, and on and on.

All living creatures eat their environment,
as dictated by their genes,
and all living creatures return to their environment
what they ate, transformed,
and that to be eaten by yet another living creature,
until it returns again to the first consumer in yet still another transformation.
This is all quite well known in several scientific disciplines, but not at all comprehended as applicable where it counts  --  for a man trying to cut thru the fog.
The bodies of all creatures are doorways between their insides and the world outside their insides --
acting as a transformers of energies.
This is how things are physically.
But man also has a non-physical inside feature -- 
--  his mind,
and it too acts as a passageway between his inside world, and the one outside, and it too transforms energies, but of such type, and in such a fashion
as to go totally unnoticed --  save by those few
interested in coming thru.  (Pardon me!)
 
 

To be ordinary and confused is to be still 
laboring under the mental misconception 
that there is an -- inside and an outside to life.
This is plainly not so, and anyone with reasonably
standard mental wiring can see it -- 
at least for brief flashes --  if they really want to;
few people do, and even those who do tend to overlook the glimpses they get of the arrangement
due to the natural difficulty in holding the realization in mind for longer than brief moments,
for when your mind is suddenly overtaken with the clear realization that there is no, 
“in-here,” or, “out-there”
it quickly shuts down mind’s normal operation;
so even though you just experienced a literally,
mind expanding insight,
the insight itself turns the mind momentarily off.
Not necessarily a “bad” thing, but what it does is
make it hard to compile a full, permanent mental picture of what you saw
from the many brief, insightful snapshots.

You can succeed in seeing this, but it is indeed tricky,
and must be constantly chased.
The astounding, though obvious secret it reveals
is right before you at all times --  but nay,
as already noted: ‘tis not, ”right before you,”
but is the “you” that is attempting to see it.
Mind does not so much “think” as it does act as a doorway between certain energies inside of you,
and certain energies outside of you;
from one useful perspective it could be said to be a
passive doorway --  not actively contributing to the very activity of thought  taking place in-&-thru it.
Try to expediently look at it like this;
collect all the glimpses you can of its routine operations from this verbally contrived vantage point,
and dispassionately ponder the consequences of 
what you see.

It's not all that difficult see --
you've just got to want to see it;
remember to look for it,
and then don't forget what you've seen.

It’s not really all that difficult to take in --  
just damn near impossible......because of its simplicity.
 

                                               J18
 
 

…oh yeah,  and remember: 
don’t look out there, and for god’s sake, don’t look in here;
                                look at the looking.