A human searches for an "identification"; which it first finds in its bond with its mother or mothering person. This is automatic, and about as guaranteed as the suckling behavior of any infant. During a child's maturing years he identifies with a broadening society, the nature of which depends on the child's sex, the environment, and social flux. Eventually, the normal and normally raised individual links their survival and destiny with the larger whole. The recognition of real relationships (perceived family) and fictive relationships (extended brotherhood of mankind for instance), is basic to the meaning of identification.

"Humility" can only be achieved through Faith. The ultimate control of each individual's destiny is based on their "faith" which refers to confidence beyond proven facts. Individuals come to realize that their society is bigger than they are. Some individuals come to realize that God is greater than they are. This is the essence of humility: to feel that we are a small part of a larger whole. One should maintain a sense of humor about one's self without necessarily being humorous. One should empathetically recognize that other humans have feelings and thoughts separate from their own. These capabilities should not be taken for granted. They require education.

"Dedication" occurs when individuals devote themselves to the betterment and protection of the whole with which they identify. As the maturing personality comes to sense the outside social frustrations and competitions, it develops a desire to defend its family and its society. As dedication and defense merge in the personality, loyalty, allegiance, and patriotism grow. The "guilt mechanism" motivates this process. Guilt is a genetically installed mechanism which disturbs and moves the social animal to sustain and increase his support of his society. The religious sector stumbled on this at least six thousand years ago. The guilt complex is stimulated just before the collection plate is passed. "Guilt is surceased by altruism". A person absent of guilt is called a sociopath.

Equanimity
Identification, humility, and dedication are a trinity of qualities essential to the healthy, normal social human mammals; faith, humor, and allegiance are the keys to the doorways through which we must pass to reach equanimity, self-assurance, Nirvana, and whatever else we wish to make our personal philosophical goal in life. It is sometimes called inner serenity, but this does not mean apathy and complacency in the face of work to be done. Equanimity is reached through understanding and self-control which gives us insight and conserves strength to do the work we must, and create the things we can. With equanimity we remain emotionally calm with a clear perception of priorities in the presence of urgent work to be done. Equanimity requires the ability to quickly appraise a situation backed by knowledge and understanding that can be acquired only through study and experience.

It is hoped that there has been enough to spotlight the fact that it takes more than the physical necessities of life to survive. There are factors of humble self-evaluation and constraint embodied in reverence and faith in addition to the concrete features of life that make it possible. The importance of reverence and faith is illustrated in the following experience. I was discussing "survival" with an expert on the subject. His profession was to teach people such as the military, pioneer organizations, and scouts how to survive if they were lost in the wilderness. He listed five essentials for survival: FOOD, WATER, SHELTER, KNOWLEDGE, and SPIRITUALITY. He maintained that a lost person without any two of these would soon die. In speaking to him about his concept of spirituality, it became evident that he was talking about identification and faith. He cited an incident when a man was downed in a small plane which was stocked with food. He was found dead sixty miles from the spot. With the plane, he had food, water, and shelter, but he seemed to lack the required identification with Nature, and faith that somehow he would survive if he stood by the plane and waited at least till the rations were exhausted. A person who does not identify and feel at home in an environment is apt to panic and do himself in. Another example is a person who feels that he is in an alien environment in the water. He struggles and panic does him in.

Faith
Philosophy typically examines the concepts of life, not the experience of life. Even though it is through experience that the concepts are born, philosophy typically looks to the variation of concepts as rational constructs, rather than based on experiential variations. Recognition of the meaning of a moment is a perceptual inclination influenced by one's inherent, idiosyncratic perceptual equipment, a mixture of hormones in the blood stream, past experience, and the extent of knowledge to which one is aware. These are the experiential variations. But there's something deeper than that. For instance, the theist and the atheist can look at the same thing, as a friend and I were both enjoying a sunny afternoon in a backyard, and both drew support from this same experience for our very different concepts. We were both in awe, but one was convinced it had to be created, while the other saw no indication of a creator.

When the temporal lobes are excited, as in temporal lobe epilepsy, the result is an intense heightening of the patient's sensory appreciation of the world and intense empathy for all beings to the extent of seeing no barriers between himself and the cosmos. This might be a clue as to the neurological basis of religious and mystical experiences, a neurological effect not experienced by the atheist. Even so, this is not totally a question of "either-or". Einstein said, "The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness."

There is a success story of a life long friend of mine who became a world renowned Scientist in marine geology. He stated that he was an atheist and carried it to a point of being antireligious. When we drove past a church, he would refer to it as a "fortress of the enemy". Yet, he was healthy and happy. In the early days of my understanding of the significance of reverence, he seemed to be an exception. I must admit that for a long time it caused me to downgrade the importance of reverence.

This was the situation until we went for a walk on a clear December night. After we had left the house and our eyes were becoming accustomed to the darkness, the star bright, moonless night came into our consciousness. It was one of those quiet cold crisp nights when the stars seemed to hang on strings where we could touch them. My own heart was filling with a symphony of the heavens when I looked toward him to see if he were appreciating the scene. He just turned his face upward, stretched out his supplicant hands and said: "Waugh!"

My friend held Nature in reverence. He had risked his life many times to know Her better. Thereby, he manifested his allegiance. He went to the bottom of oceans in experimental submarines. He sailed closer than anybody to marine volcanoes. He defied sharks to dive among reefs. He subjected his own value of himself that he might get a closer look at Nature. He values knowledge of Science above all else and believes himself to be but one more little phenomenon in a great wide universe.

Faith in nature
As the field of Science has enlarged, there has grown a group of people who place their faith in Nature. By the middle of the 1600's there were a perceptible number of people who professed to believe that God is natural. This was almost an anachronism, for at that time it is doubtful if they understood the difference between natural and supernatural. It took a great deal of faith to say that "all is reality" and "reality is a unified whole". Even today, we find ourselves in a galaxy of subatomic particles the characteristics of which we barely suspect, to say nothing of understanding. If we estimate the energies of the universe, some have estimated we understand, perhaps, less than three percent. It takes a great deal of faith to believe in the unity of reality under those conditions. Neutrons are hardly slowed by the thick armor of tanks. We think billions of neutrinos pass through our planet every second at the speed of light without slowing down. He have a greatly extended confidence that the laws of conservation of mass, energy, momentum, and the laws of entropy and gravity apply there too. We just don't know how.

Faith in the Supernatural (God)
We find that most people feel that the destiny of human souls with whom they identify is at the mercy of supernatural spirits. This usually includes the spirit of evil as well as God. Despite what anyone may think of this concept, it has certainly been enduring and has a positive affect on the lives and societies of those who accept it. One can just as easily accept and live by the laws of God and achieve a happy life if they are the same as the laws of Nature. In other words, faith in a supernatural God can pull a person through situations when nothing else will do. However this can be a problem when all decisions are left to the time of some "final day of judgment", and philosophical considerations are confined to a rigid structure that is unyielding to the laws of Nature. It is a problem that when new information arrives to question something that is established as the Word of God. There is a danger that one's faith in the perfection of that God is threatened. This results in dogma that can be in conflict with reality.

Faith in humanity
There is a great number of people who know a good deal about the supernatural and the natural who point out that in the last analysis it is humanity that shapes its own destiny. To them nothing counts more than life and death, and it is people who affect this outcome more than anything else. However insecure they may feel about the course of human events, they feel it is people who will eventually determine whether we survive at all, and whether the quality of survival will be worth it. In a world where most of the people are waiting and praying for a supernatural spirit to do it for them, in this life or the next, these pragmatic people must have enduring faith in human perseverance.

We have said in this chapter that we may succeed with a faith in one or all of three great fields of thought:

Logically we may conceive of the fourth proposition in which an individual may have all his faith in himself. Experience with reality clearly nullifies the fourth as a successful approach to a healthy, happy, effective life. As we will see, it can lead to alienation (the next chapter). It does not work.

The evolution of identification
In the development of any individual's social attitude we see a recapitulation in the sense that the essential steps of evolution have been preserved to guide the development of each individual. The neurological mechanism of reverence has evolved over a tremendously long time and is so deep in our subconscious that a person can ignore it and not understand why he is periled. Within us there is an array of immutable psychological conditions which start with multiple specific ideas and mature into single generalized concepts. With study of the history of human thought, we learn that many ideas have changed from varied and specific to the less varied and more general. But, even with mental evolution, capabilities only grow with competitive challenges and compelling environmental strain. Survival is always at stake when more permanent genetic changes take place. Genetic advantage occurs whenever an individual is born with an increased capability and/or a new capability that applies to some work that the species must do.

In man, reverence is first identified in his primitive kinship in that he first identified himself within a family. One can imagine that an offspring that did not identify within a family, due to a genetic flaw, would tend to wander off, become lost, suffer from exposure, starve to death, or be eaten. This problem is universal in the animal kingdom. Nature's requirement for social animals is some degree of fixation and bonding. With chickens, ducks and other creatures that are able to forage for themselves as soon as they are hatched, but need their parents to guard them, fixation is complete and instantaneous. Bonding is a hereditary behavior pattern that links the new born with its parent or any other creature standing nearby. Under domestic conditions some strange combinations can occur such as ducklings being fixated on a pet dog. Progressive identification is part of the agenda of maturation of a social animal. The human baby first identifies with its mother, then its next closest associate, who could be the father, siblings, aunts, and uncles: whoever is around the mother the most. Anyone who has watched a family develop knows the shyness that keeps a child's confidence within a small family circle.

When the world population of humans was low, integral wandering units did not extend much beyond a family group. As populations increased, pure mechanical factors as well as social advantages and safety led to a crowding of groups and related people who formed tribes. More extended family relationships were recognized beyond the immediate family where everyone was recognized at least as a cousin.

Identification and sexual-mating: a rule
Let us digress for a moment to consider a very important thought with respect to identification. It all began innocently enough with a sociologist asking how many people first introduced in a Jewish Kibbutz went on to get married? He interviewed over two thousand people who grew up in a Kibbutz to find out how many of them married some one else in the same kibbutz. The answer was: none! Within the Kibbutz is a preschool facility where working mothers may deposit their babies right after they are weaned until they are school age. These children, in groups of ten to thirty individuals, would see each other five or six days out of the week from several months to six years old. After they go through puberty, they will not copulate with another one from the same group. It was thought that one exception was found, but further research revealed that she had been removed from the kibbutz for three years between the ages of two and five.

If we consider a primitive tribe of thirty individuals, we now find children growing up under similar conditions: that of growing up from zero to six seeing the same children every day. If we can transpose the above finding to such a situation, we will expect no marriages between such children. When marriages do occur, the progeny are destined to genetic flaws eliminating them from the "genetic pool" over generations of inbreeding. Examples of this exist today.

Identification in the social milieu
A developing personality must fit into the spiritual and social milieu of the times. As a person matures, we frequently hear the question: "Who am I?" in the early phases of adulthood the person is searching for a uniqueness that he can identify as his very own. It takes some insight to be able to tell these people that for social mammals the better question is: "With whom do I belong?" The more unique a person is, the more difficult is the answer. A unique person finds himself estranged from the crowd and poorly understood. The question: "How am I unique?" is self defeating and complicates the problem rather than solving it. "How am I like the others?" is more to the point. A compromise that will work would be: "How am I unique in the social fabric?" Once an individual is able to identify with a group, he then feels more secure because he understands who his compatriots are.

In youth groups the single common denominator is the energy level in their physical and mental activity. Muscle development is a matter of much concern high on the priorities of a maturing group. It is also characteristic that a group remains intact without additions and subtractions of members, all maturing together. The group usually holds together until individuals marry and join the substrate of society. Younger individuals form a group of their own which in turn matures and is broken up by matrimony. Most clubs and organizations suffer from aging and attrition without a defined program of initiating younger members to the group.

Every personality needs an outside "steady" reference point to maintain proper balance. It is like a light hand on a stable reference point when entering into an unstable situation. Thus, personal psychological stability depends upon an outside reference. A faith in self is like a tight rope walker without a balancing bar: it does not work. A person without a dedicated faith suffers paradoxical and contradictory thinking.