The Second Dot OK – moving back to my earlier post (for those of you that care) where I posited that humans have an in-built need for “joining the dots”, I want to move one step further and propose that not only is this the case but also that humans crave SOMETHING MORE. This “something more” is explained in a number of ways but essentially the recurring form that this takes is the desire to return to a lost time of bliss. Here the “something more” is a time or a place distantly “remembered” which makes our current situation seem flatter, duller, less happy than the golden period. Several explanations have been given for this; the Fall and exile from the garden of Eden in Judaeo-Christian tradition; the separation form the mother in Freudian psychology; the separation of the Ego from the Self in Jungian psychology; and of course the Fall of Atlantis for our friends the diabolists. These are just some of the ones that I am most familiar with. you don’t have to go too far to encounter others. This is the most basic form but there are others. The Romantic poets, for example, felt they touched something in the recent past that made their present pale in comparison (so they often killed themselves) – and I guess the same could be said for the psychedelic explorers of the 60’s. In a similar way, other traditions look *forward* to a golden age (same culprits as above; they obviously see no contradiction between the two). But the basic fact is that humans have this desire for something more than they currently have. I’m no animal psychologist but I believe that the same is not true for other animals. They are perfectly content to live in the present so long as their physical needs are met. So that’s it for the moment. Point 1 – Join the dots; Point 2 – Something more. More anon.