Why you relate to the penguin

These penguins are all heading to the open border to the right. >> This is the clip from Vera Herzog's Encounters of the End of the World, which is going viral right now. Let's watch the whole clip. It's about a minute long. >> But one of them caught our eye, the one in the center. He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight towards the mountains, some 70 km away. Dr. Anley explained that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would immediately head right back for the mountains, but why? Okay, let's talk about this a little bit because uh this has captured the fantasy of the entire internet. A lot of people talking about this right now and sort of relating with the penguin and writing a narrative uh imposing a narrative so to speak for the penguin psychology. A lot of it has to do with a philosophy of nihilism, self-destruction, uh existential despair. Uh Herzog's own interpretation, he said that the penguin was perhaps deranged. He asks the expert if there's such a thing as insanity among penguins. >> Dr. Angley, is there such thing as insanity among penguins? >> Some people relate to it as some type of uh depression. Others others speak about um being pulled back into negative habits uh like a moth to the flame or perhaps like a penguin to the mountains. maybe to coin a new phrase. I want to speak a little bit about this from my own perspective and uh sort of weigh in and throw in my my take. If everyone's commenting on this, why not me? Okay, so those of you who watch the content on this channel regularly know that I speak often about something called sensitive souls. It's a term that I use uh to describe a certain personality type who finds embodiment difficult. What I mean by that is that this is predicated on the assumption that we are souls and [clears throat] that we exist before and after our embodiment and that we have an embodiment experience and that this is universally awkward for all humanity. But [clears throat] most people sort of learn how to live with it until it doesn't even occur to them that it's something strange. And then we have a small segment of the population who I call the sensitive souls who are just unendingly perturbed by this condition. Perturbed doesn't do it justice. That's uh trivializes it. There's a certain existential pain of just being a soul in a body uh confined to this meat suit and then bombarded with all the stimuli of the physical plane. And many such people exhibit behaviors which the rest of society would consider to be self-destructive. namely selfn numbing behaviors, escapism such as what we call addiction uh which is probably a misnomer because uh addiction really implies the physical dependency on a chemical. That's not really what it is because even when the sensitive soul gets clean and they don't have a physical dependency, they are left emotionally raw and cannot [clears throat] be comfortable in their own skin and then need to medicate again. So, it's not really addiction the way that like the medical field describes it as a chemical dependency, but rather a need for numbing. The sensitive soul needs numbing. And the behavior appears self-destructive to the extent that people will say, "Why are you doing this? Why are you destroying yourself?" Like it it literally appears self-destructive. But the reality is that it is a survival mechanism, ironically speaking, because it does end tragically in self-destruction. But the impulse is actually ironically an impulse for self-preservation. And that's what I'm seeing in the penguin here because let me explain something to you. Uh I don't want to I don't want to anthropomorphize the penguin's experience. To say the p penguin is expressing some type of nihilistic bent is attributing not only cerebral thought onto this animal but like deep philosophical motivations which I personally I'm an animal lover but I I don't believe that animals especially you know a penguin a bird brain literally can experiencing it can experience anything like that. What I do believe, and this is not to make it a less valid experience, it's it is what it is, is that a that an animal uh certainly an an a vertebrae animal like that um has a nervous system and that nervous system can signal distress to the organism. And what I do believe is this, that the penguin was probably pretty stressed out in its environment. Uh, it's not fleeing to some type of like abstract imagination of another reality because I don't believe that it's it's capable of imagination. What I do believe is that its current conditions, whatever they were, were distressing and the penguin's got to get out of there. It's got to get out of there. So, it's interesting. As humans, we watch this and we put this whole narrative to it. But probably what it is is just an organism in distress saying, "I don't know where I got to go, but it ain't here." Like, this is not comfortable. Okay, here's what I want to tell you. We as humans have very similar reactions, but then we put a whole story onto it for ourselves. I'm saying we superimpose a whole narrative to it ourselves. In others, what I'm saying is with I don't want to insult anyone, but a lot of times we create a philosophical narrative to explain something that at bottom is a physiological phenomenon and a survival instinct. In other words, I'll just say it very simply, we're stressed out because of our situation. Maybe it's something circumstantial. Um, you know, there's some type of situation that's stressful. Maybe it's just like I said, the stress of embodiment itself, having to process all the stimuli of the world. And uh maybe it's social pressures. It's it's being forced to interact with human beings, which if you're introverted can put a lot of uh burden on your alistatic load. It can actually feel traumatizing. And if you don't relate to that and that sounds dramatic, God bless you. Then you don't relate to it. But the point is that the organism is recognizing that this is overwhelming. This is threatening. This is not healthy for me. I got to get out of here. Okay. So what do we do? You don't run to the mountains. Although sometimes, you know, ge geographical escape is the mode of escape. But often nowadays we do a much easier way of checking out. you know, doom scrolling, you know, just getting entranced by screens or, you know, the good old tried and true, you know, self-medicating chemically, drinks, drugs. But the point is, here's what I want to explain that that penchant for escape is not actual self-destruction. It's actually coming from a healthy place. It's a God-given survival me mechanism where the organism says the conditions currently are depleting, exhausting, they're frying my nervous system and this is not this is not tenable. I got to do something. I don't know where I got to go, but it's not here. And so like the penguin running off to the mountains, which is going to mean certain doom because it's going to starve to death there. Um but you don't make those calculations because you just know here and now is not safe. So what you do is you do some type of escape whether it's literal escape or more often um internal escape and yeah the outcome is tragic. It's not productive but you have to understand it it's not suicidal. It's actually the organism wanting to live. It's actually saying, "I'm trying to survive. I'm trying to live over here. I can't live where I'm at. I can't live under these conditions anywhere but here. Let me get away and maybe I'll be able to live over there." Okay? And unfortunately, what happens in most cases like this is [snorts] it doesn't work out like planned. But it wasn't really a plan. It was more of like an impulse. So, here's what I want to explain. Um, if you relate to this, if you're like this distressed penguin who's feeling like, I got to check out. I just got to go somewhere. I got to numb myself. I got to just take the edge off. I can't continue experiencing everything so raw the way that I am. Um, and you're finding that you're gravitating toward what you ultimately realize are self-destructive behaviors. and you're like, "Well, I don't want to do this, but I can't just go back to the old situation because that was killing me." Uh, and I don't mean that hyperbolically or figuratively. I mean literally killing you. Uh, maybe a slow death, which in some ways is, you know, Chinese water torture. It's a long protracted torture. Um, if you're finding that you're in such a situation, then we got to stop a second and say like this. We're not penguins. We're humans. And just like we have the ability to impose a philosophical interpretation of the problem, we can turn to a philosophical solution. By philosophical, don't be scared by, you know, the multi-elabic words. I I I just mean an idea. I mean a concept. I mean something [sighs] that we can envision in our mind. that makes the here and now more bearable. So without actually having to run to the mountains literally or figuratively, we can stay here, stay present in our situation but not be under such stress. And that is the alternative which many sensitive souls ultimately discover which is spiritual consciousness. Um I'm not here to convince anybody. I'm not here to, you know, this is I'm not I'm not trying to win an argument. This is not PMIC. If this is something you already relate to, I'm trying to describe a phenomenon or give words to an experience that you may already have had and encourage you in that direction, which is that by becoming spiritually conscious, especially forming a personal relationship with God and becoming aware of our lives as as a story that's unfolding, that's being directed with purpose, with Meaning we can find it more bearable to remain lucid, conscious and present in the here and now in the world the reality that God is creating. So if we can superimpose philosophical uh narratives to the problem and call it you know a nihilistic penguin. We can also give it uh a solution that's spiritual. Let me try to spell it out very very simply. For some of us the experience of being embodied souls is always going to be intense and overwhelming. For some of us, social interaction is always intense and overwhelming. Um, just going about day-to-day life, adult responsibilities, not that we can't do it, not that we're incompetent, we can do it, but it's intense and overwhelming. And instead of saying, "I got to run off to the mountains and escape, or I got to doom scroll, or I got a drink, or I got a drug, or get involved in drama, or whatever else to distract myself from what I would be feeling." What we can do is take a deep breath and we can [snorts] ground ourselves in the here and now with a spiritual idea of being an embodied soul on a mission. My soul was sent here. Boundless light was sent here for an embodiment experience. To have a human experience, for a purpose which is integral to the grand design, to the purpose of everything and I can breathe, I can be present. I can get through this moment. I can try to even be aware of my surroundings so I can be helpful to more of God's kids. And then I don't have to run away. I can be right here. And that's how I'm looking at the uh at the penguin. And if this resonates with you, great. Maybe leave a comment and share some of your personal experiences so I can benefit. And uh maybe we'll get a conversation