Human Delusions

I have heard it said that humans are the animal that tells stories about itself. This fitting description comes close to the purpose of consciousness. Consciousness is a lot about delusion. It enables us to describe what is not there. We are able to amass committed armies to fight each others nations in wars, not over any material change like the theft of property, land or murders of your own kin, but on mere ideas. Wars are fought, at times, for reasons that only exist in words. Ideologies have no physical properties. They are ethereal constructs, dependent on faith. Yet people can be convinced to kill and die for them. No other animal would be stupid enough to fight over an idea. They may fight over food, territory or mates, but never over an idea. The smell of a rival maybe enough to raise ones hackles and here consciousness steps in. We are preprogrammed to fear and distrust people from other tribes. Racism exists in all of us. But through consciousness we can rationalise its stupidity. We can construct a logic to overcome our base instincts. So, here I have presented an instance where the consciousness free state of animals could never lead to a war of ideologies, and presented an instance where consciousness delivers us from traps of instinct. It hardly counts as a superior condition to animal consciousness, because they clearly have awareness. In many ways it is through the stories we are able to tell ourselves, the elaborate self justifications that we can slip in to the hubris necessary to destroy our environment. A consequence of human consciousness is the perceived dualism we all experience each day. The feeling our minds are seperate from our bodies. Other animals live the singleist truth. Our dualist delusion is the foundation of each mistaken move to destroy our environment. Destroying our environment is as stupid as destroying our own bodies. Only humans, through dualism and the feeling that soul is seperate from body, would become so detached as to damage ourselves. This riddle is at the heart of drug addiction. Here an individual actively destroys the physicality of self to further transcendent conditions of mind. The illness or negative habitual behaviour can sustain the deluded state unto death. This same dissociation of soul and body, the delusion of consciousness free of bodily restraint, can lead to the similar disregard for the environment. Because we need the environment as much as we need our bodies. We are our environment in the same way we are our bodies. Kill either and the 'we' we have separated off die too. We are one. The failure to see the body and mind are one thing is what destroys addicts, and failure to recognise we can never be seperate from our environment is what will destroy humanity. they are the same philosophical problem.
So the question seems to me to be how do we recapture the animal singular condition. We are stuck w ith consciousness, or so it would appear. Buddhist teaching suggest a practiced path to escape consciousness. In other ways we do it each day through the concept of flow, the condition where we are in the moment through engaging in practice. Some get here through downhill skiing, rock climbing, guitar playing, painting; any activity where the process requires our skill to the edge but not beyond our limit. But would achieving this state, alone, be enough to stall our repeated plunges in to the hubris endemic, epidemic, that results from the dualist delusion? Alone, as individuals, we must try. It has taken humanity till now to find, through neuroscience, evidence to prove what Gilbert Ryle suggested through language, that the self is an illusion. That there is no homunculus inside our heads. That free will, as we experience it is an illusion. These understandings must be the foundations of our new and fresh approach to life in the new age.
We seem endlessly capable of telling stories. We can interpret evidence so well we can reverse truth. Human consciousness is mostly about this. Convincing ourselves, and those we meet, that the opposite is true to what would appear. That what is hot is really cool, if only you look at things this way. The story of genesis where Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge is surely the parable of human consciousness. Our fall from the grace of the animal kingdom.
The seeds of our doom are probably sown. But what would go a good way to reclaiming our grace would be rejection of the dualist delusion.