Living a Human Life: Coping with What Comes Before Us

By Edward Averill

Living a Human Life enables us to comprehend the top-level process concerning how all humans make our emotional and behavioral responses to the never-ending sequence of situations we meet during our lives. That comprehension enables us to live our unique human lives in a way that brings all of us together so that each understands how to work with others and so that our unique qualities work toward the ideal of benefiting others. Author Edward Averill draws attention to the analogy that each human cell in one’s body is needed to work with other cells to play its unique part to keep the whole body healthy; just as all individual humans need to keep the body of humanity healthy.

Humans are individually unique: we have inherited bodily conditions, innate predispositions, and environments where we actively express our emotions under the control of our thinking capability. A principle conceptual realization is that these differences develop the current content in our minds, which directs how one’s life-force energy expresses one’s behavioral and emotional responses to encountered situations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781480875975

Edward Averill

Edward Averill began contemplating the purpose of human life when he was only a child. He was educated in the United Kingdom within private and public schools. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1947 with a degree in natural science and geology, and spent four years on geological and geophysical teams in the Middle East and West Africa before passing his PhD orals in geology at McGill University in 1954. Then in 1955, being highly attracted to computing, he jumped career ship to begin forty-years in system and software engineering. After retirement, he used his extensive background to actively research human life and its purpose, to spend some twelve years writing Living a Human Life.

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Copyright © 2019 Edward Averill.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-7596-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-7597-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019903055

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/19/2019

Acknowledgement

I owe a great deal to my wife, Diane, for hours of interaction about living a human life. Her point of view uniquely complemented what I was struggling to articulate; her participation assisted getting the ideas in this book as far as they have. I also want to thank my sister, Elizabeth Fraser, who let me read aloud to her each paragraph so that I could pay attention to how I had structured each sentence.

Foreword

My intention is not to use intellectual knowledge to tell anyone the way things are, or how one should live according to others people’s written texts; but rather it is to present how humans need to pay attention to the perceptive inputs that enter their nonphysical minds via abstract sensing/feeling. Then, working with others on their collective perceptive inputs, leads very gradually to further evolution of living human lives via changing day to day behavioral decisions that express their emotions by means of their motivations and life-force energy.

The purpose of human living is seen to be evolving thinking capabilities to constantly climb through an evolution of conceptual realizations to gain conscious awareness that living exists within transcendental, mental, emotional, and physical environments.

An Overview of the Book

The conceptual realizations about human living in this book came from a lifelong background of trying to understand the point/purpose/value of living human lives. When retired, I turned my mind’s à priori perceptive inputs into unified conceptual realizations that were consistent with the accepted ideas of past writers on philosophy and science. The ideas in the conceptual realizations presented came from: –

a. The physical evidence left in the surface deposits from some two million years ago, by the lives of the species Habilis and Erectus in the homo Genus––from their newly evolved lifestyles and thinking. Then, approximately 500,000 years ago came homo Sapiens with evolved conscious awareness and intellect that has led to today’s world. A personal forty-years in system-software engineering suggested that too many humans behave as emotionally driven robots through emotional/motivational expressions.

b. Perceiving humans are units within the body of humanity, just as the cells in our bodies are––no matter where or when humans are born, or the living conditions of their lives.

c. Perceiving humans spend their entire lives using their memories to decide how to make emotional/behavioral responses to each next moment of living.

d. If one’s memory cannot lead one to decide how to make one’s responses, then one adopts memory content and motivation from those whom one thinks know how.

e. All memory is established by developing one’s thinking capability, under the influence of such items as personal innate predispositions, developing conscious awareness, current emotional state, and the examples of nearby others. When we are open to receive perceptive inputs and work on them with others, we gradually advance our collective understanding of human living in the form of conceptual realizations.

Human living is seen to be gaining new conscious awareness by becoming team players in the game of living human lives––by means of taking opportunities to work with others on received perceptive inputs. One’s innate predispositions, inborn capabilities, and the examples of others can lead each of us to play our individual part toward making everyone’s human living meaningful and worthwhile to others. The objective of living becomes giving real friendship to all others, introducing human husbandry for all, while playing our minute role/part toward living and evolving life on Earth.

Preface

The original roots of the book’s subject matter came from growing up during the early 1930’s north and west of London in the UK. I was the sort of child, who in occasional quiet moments while between four and eight-year-old self, wondered about the point of living a human life. Of course, I didn’t understand enough to talk about it. On top of that were the news reports of wars, such as the Japanese horrifying cruelty on the Chinese, the Italians in Ethiopia, and the on-going Nazi invasion of Europe, and I wondered what living as a human was really about. At eight, I was sent with my brothers to board at Preparatory school for eight months of the year. School started my education and experience of living my life, and my wondering became a more distant background activity while actually caught up in living my human life and coping with my emotional nature.

Throughout my education and fifty plus years of earning my living until I was fully retired, I gained much experience from living my life; not just from my own experiences but also my observations of the lives of so many others all over the world. In the later part of my life I became more and more aware that my experience and skills represented only a very tiny fraction of knowhow and labor that was needed for living human lives in today’s world. The particular experience and skills of others were necessary for everyone else to be able to live their human lives.

During my education, I was drawn to understand scientific knowledge and handed-down beliefs to which I had given serious attention while trying to look at the reality about living human lives from my life and its point of view. Then, I discovered all human intellectual knowledge, and all individual human beliefs, were only valid within the scope of awareness and assumptions on which they were founded.

Eventually my understanding about living a human life gained a more truthful understanding of my own human nature and limitations. But that took honest observation and acceptance of the reality of my own nature and behavior. That was the beginning of understanding the source and nature of egotistical behavior—through awareness of my own beliefs, which later, I realized came from others.

My forty-year experience in system and software gave me a more practical understanding of the essential and different functions of living a human life. Also, it gave me a more complete practical understanding of the relationship between my nonphysical mind and my physical mind.

Contents

Introduction to Living a Human Life

Part I

I-One           Evolution within Living a Human Life

I-Two           Living my Human Life

I-Three         The Greater Context for Living a Human Life

I-Four           Abstract Sensing/Feelings, and Evolution

I-Five           Human Lifestyles and Robotic Behavior

I-Six             Human Living and One’s Mindset Contents

I-Seven         Evidence of Changing Human Lifestyles

I-Eight         Summary from Living a Human Life

I-Nine          The Vital Need for Human Husbandry

I-Ten            Relating Conflict to Mindset Content

I-Eleven        A Sketch of My Life’s Experiences

Bibliography and Research for the Part I Chapters

Part II

II-One          The Transition from I to II

II-Two          Conscious Awareness, Belief, and Motivation

II-Three        Foundation for Religious Thought

II-Four         Foundation for Astrological Thought

II-Five          Foundation for Present-day Thought

II-Six           Epilogue

Part III

III-One         Evolution and Perceptive Awareness

III-Two        A Summary of Human Living

III-Three       Psychology and Human Evolution

III-Four        My Current Concept of the Role of Beliefs in Human Living Behavior

Introduction to Living a Human Life

Having spent forty years in software and systems engineering, I have come to realize that everyone can behave in a robotic way through their habits, as well as in how they respond to encountered situations. Habits are both a necessity and a problem that can cause failure to contribute positively to the lives of others. However, there is a clear distinction between humans, who are basically emotional creatures, and robots that have no emotions at all. ‘Robotic thinking’ is a clear example of habit, it is controlled by software engineers as they develop the written instructions for the robot to follow. It is possible for robots in the hands of software engineers to be made to appear to behave in human ways if hardware engineers have given the robot a face