Survival Mode, Needs Hierarchies, And The Struggle Of The Free Human Spirit

Exploring survival biology and the evolution of human consciousness.

“People can’t be well in survival mode. It’s not the person who is sick; it’s the culture.”
Nicole LePera

Dear friends,

After a few days in the mountains sleeping in my car (because it was summer, and because I wanted to hike, and it’s a lot easier than camping in a tent), I’ve spent the last week intensively searching for housing in and around Boulder, Colorado.

Shelter is a basic human need, and for many of us - including myself - not having a home can trigger us into survival mode.

Scouring Zillow every day for new listings in the hopes of being first (and therefore the most likely to be granted a lease in the hyper competitive market here) the past week has felt like a jumble of days melting together in a blur of purple dots on digital maps, emails, texts, and home tours, and the all too familiar sense of trepidation when filling out an application.

▶ Will my credit report make up for my self employment status?
▶ Will my past landlord give me a good reference even though I broke the lease?
▶ Will the landlord accept bank statements as proof of income since I’m self employed?

This process of finding shelter has always triggered a deeply wounded place inside of me that fears I’ll never find a forever home; that someone else will always have power over my ability to put a roof over my head (and the power to take it away); that I’ll need to perform in some manner - contorting myself into the image of a perfect tenant, which might change landlord to landlord - just to shelter myself.

This time, I’m doing things differently (even though, to be sure, there are remnants of these fears alive inside of me).

This time, I’m showing up as I am: no makeup, dusty Luna sandals, a wool tanktop and a warm smile.

This time, I am open to all possible solutions and I’m unwilling to give in to urgency.

I trust myself to say NO to the wrong places (and landlords), and YES to the right ones.

Still, this whole process has me thinking about society at large, and how sick we are as a culture.

Yesterday, after touring one of the most beautiful homes I have ever seen, I was lamenting the fact that landlords never ask prospective tenants:

▶ What are your values?
▶ How do you approach conflict resolution?
▶ Will you share a story of overcoming a challenge or big life obstacle?
▶ What are you doing to make the world and your community a little bit better?

Instead, renters are asked to provide cold hard metrics like credit reports, background checks and income tax returns. It is always about the money (will we be able to pay their mortgage and provide them with the extra income they want?), and rarely about the human being (unless, of course, they find out we’re a convicted criminal - which may or may not accurately reflect our true character).

Plus, these uncomfortable “conversations” are always outsourced to third parties like Zillow and the 3 credit bureaus so landlords and tenants don’t have to actually speak to each other directly about money, work, and personal ethics.

We’ve reduced the value of a human being into a commoditized data set that is supposed to represent our worthiness of shelter.

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We are all worthy of getting our basic needs met.

Lacking the basic needs for food, water and shelter, we will surely feel outcast to the margins of society without any hope or strategy for securing our belonging to it; and no matter how much we might want to feel welcomed into the arms of whatever culture we find ourselves embedded within, we will be tempted by our own survival biology to become whatever we think “they” want us to be. “They” could be our family; spiritual community; a landlor or boss, colleagues, teachers or friends.

Ironically, this drive to “belong” is so deeply entrenched with the ability to meet our basic needs of food, clean water, and shelter, it’s almost impossible to separate them; this is because we need money to meet those needs, and the need for money demands that we find work; and our jobs often demand adherence to a social, political, scientific or religious ethic that we may or may not align with. So we adopt “good girl/boy” behavior, suppress our authentic nature, uphold the status quo and cling to whatever houses, jobs, and people we can as if our life depended on it.

We’re often told that, in the United States anyway, we are far better off in terms of basic needs getting met than we were a few hundred years ago.

Which begs the question:

Why are we so ill?

From allergies, asthma, ADD, autism and cancer to so-called autoimmune conditions (I don’t subscribe to the belief that the body attacks itself) and chronic pain; and from depression, anxiety, and all manner of psychiatric diagnoses to episodes of horrific social violence…we are getting sicker.

Why?

Health is listed as a basic human need after water, food and shelter; yet most of us are sick today, even the millionaires and billionaires.

If we could summon the courage to turn towards pain - all pain, including emotional pain, spiritual pain, ecological pain, physical illness and social violence - with radical openness and curiosity, we would discover the truth: many of our ailments are symptomatic of a sick social organism.

Our primary human needs are embedded into a modern socio-economic fabric that has become so financially and socially strained that the whole thing appears to be unraveling. This unraveling will not be an overnight event, but it is palpably present and observable for anyone who is paying attention. Survival mode (the physiological and psychological state of being we embody when our basic needs are barely - or not - being met) can cause pain and disease; it can also make healing next to impossible.

Survival mode, however, is complex; and it is entirely possible to have an abundance of resources and still act from a place of survival biology and its associated behaviors.

Let’s take a look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Disclaimer: I am not well versed or well read in traditional psychotherapy literature, and this article (like all of my writings) is an exploration of my meandering thoughts, observations and personal stories rather than an attempt to impart “factual” or “scientific” information.

The above graphic is a general overview and visual demonstration of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs as described in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” (which I have not read - I have merely read other people’s descriptions of his work).

This graph, and the framework presented by placing human needs inside of a progressive hierarchy, is helpful in conceptualizing the complex nature of the human organism in the context of its whole environment: planet, cosmos and culture. And, I would put forward that in order to truly make sense of human nature and human behavior, and how our needs correlate with our experiences of pain, illness, healing and freedom, we need to look at these needs in the context of human evolution.

At the top of the pyramid we find “self actualization,” which I would describe as the development of [individual] human freedom.

Human beings, like all living phenomena, are in process; we are still evolving into our highest possible form. It is my conviction that self actualization was not only impossible for most human beings only a few hundred years ago, but also developmentally inappropriate for our “age.”

Just as it would be inappropriate for a young child that is 7 years old today to take a job as an Uber driver, it would have been inappropriate for human beings to self actualize while still (generally speaking, because nothing is black and white) developmentally too immature to wield such responsibility. Undoubtedly, there were spiritually mature individuals among us thousands of years ago; and I would argue that there are many among us today who are not yet spiritually developed enough to self actualize. This is representative of the contracting/expanding nature of reality, which allows for de-evolution to be occurring simultaneously with evolution when we look at humanity as a whole, undulating, ever-changing organism through time.

Individual human freedom, or the ability to self actualize, is an emergent phenomenon made possible by the parallel evolution of money. (This is a topic we will explore in depth on the upcoming HFP podcast, and here on Substack).

For most of human history, however, survival depended on belonging to a tribe that worked together to meet their collective needs of shelter, food, water, sex, procreation and family. The formation of spiritual communities acted to cement these bonds of belonging through ritual, ceremony and cultural customs.

In many ways, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - while valuable to contemplate - describe observable phenomena of modern humans and their behaviors; it doesn’t tell us anything about how we got here, or where we are going.

It appears to me that today, all of these needs are competing with each other simultaneously as the free human spirit struggles towards its emergent destiny through the gauntlet of the modern age with its materialism, scientism, socio-political tribalism, cancel culture, A.I. and the coming technocracy, the corrupt merger of state and corporate powers, a debt based economic system that is rapidly imploding, and a state regulated education system that has succeeded - stunningly - in turning human beings into automatons.

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Is it possible to be well as an individual in a sick society?

Is it possible for society to be well, when it is full of unhealthy individuals?

Which has to come first?

These questions present us with a paradox that is worthy of our full and conscientious exploration.

My personal belief is that, like freedom, health - whether within an individual or a society - is an emergent phenomenon; which means that in order to cultivate it consciously we must penetrate to the deeper strata of reality in order to arrive at an understanding of the whole human organism in the context of its whole environment. Remedies and solutions will always be unique to the individual; and societies will always be made of unique individuals. Yet they constantly reflect one another.

A healthy social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection; and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living.

Rudolf Steiner

I quoted Nicole LePera at the beginning of this letter, in which she says “it’s not the person who is sick; it’s the culture.”

What do you think?

I believe it is both.

Whatever “is” is; and because it is (and for no other reason) it represents what we must confront in order to heal and find freedom. We must confront the reality of a sick society with as much curiosity and compassion as the sick individual; when we do, we will find one within the other. Meanwhile, a concurrent evolutionary phenomenon is manifesting.

Even though so many of us today find ourselves in survival mode (for reasons as unique as we are), the human spirit struggles towards freedom.

Making itself felt through pain and illness (the wake up call most of us need to snap out of our robotic lives); in the quiet desperation of untapped potential going unfulfilled that keeps us awake at night; in our yearning for self expression, social fears be damned; in our quest for truths that could get us canceled or banished; it is clear that we long to unite with the free human spirit inside of us, whose presence only gets harder to ignore the more we try to suppress it.

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Friends, I am so happy!

This place - Colorado, and specifically Boulder and surrounding areas - meets my needs beyond anything that could be described in a graph or chart.

Colorado has nourished me - body, soul and spirit - with big blue skies, with new and old friendships, with fleeting flirtations, sun kissed skin, hikes up mountains erupting from the plains, a bald eagle on my birthday, and a feeling of deeply rooted health I haven’t embodied in ages.

It is 9:24pm on Sunday night as I am typing this, and I have not yet found housing. We leave for California on Thursday morning in order to pack a moving truck back in California.

I’m not worried.

This trip has been so fortifying for my soul and spirit that I find myself in a deep place of trust around housing, which is totally new for me. Perhaps this means I’ve finally healed the wounds around home and homelessness, not feeling wanted, and always feeling like an outsider.

I know where I feel most at home in the entire world, and that is a true blessing.

With love,
Elisha