In his landmark book, Peacemaking Among Primates (1989), primatologist Frans de Waal describes a behaviour he first documented among the chimpanzees of Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands a decade earlier. After a fight, former opponents would seek each other out and re-establish contact by grooming, embracing, kissing, and holding hands. Reconciliation seemed to occur most reliably between individuals whose relationship is more highly valued — such as kin, allies, high-ranking partners, and frequent grooming partners — and measurably lowered the probability of aggression in the future. But, what makes this more than a social nicety is that this process of reconciliation is likely both external and physiological.
Filippo Aureli’s work with macaques shows that their self-directed scratching, a dependable index of anxiety in primates, rises sharply after conflict and remains elevated until they are able to reconcile with their adversary. The same goes for their heart rate. That suggests that inner and outer balance may be connected. An animal that is too agitated to approach a recent opponent cannot reconcile, and a group in which reconciliation fails cannot hold together. Internal balance is critical to social cohesion. This perhaps suggests how consciousness came to be. Over the long arc of the development of consciousness as part of living things, it appears unlikely that it arose in individual minds in isolation.
Consciousness likely emerged as life became increasingly cooperative and required organisms not only to sense the state of the world but also to cooperate and read one another. As nervous systems grew more sophisticated, they went beyond simply maintaining internal physiological parameters like temperature or heart rate, to also maintaining relationships with others. Consciousness was likely a core part of the machinery through which those relationships were stabilised. De Waal’s larger point was that managing aggression is key to reconciliation. Groups that fight and then make up are more cohesive than groups that either suppress conflict altogether or never reconcile. This suggests that the process succeeded not by preventing tension, but by making its repair reliable.
Reconciliation has since been documented in hyenas, dolphins, wolves, and goats, but humans do this far more widely than other higher primates. Chimpanzees reconcile with individuals they know, while humans are able to do so with strangers and across generations. This is not to say that we always repair bonds, but we do it with greater frequency and intentionality than do other species. The kind of repair we can engage in is not common. A chimpanzee repairs a relationship through touch, in the hours after a fight, with an animal it can see. But, that is not a reliable process, since we cannot embrace a stranger we have wronged, and often we cannot find them.
In the case of humans, we have developed external institutions such as courts and laws to take the place of peacemakers. But, external institutions are not sufficient if the individuals in these societies lack the capacity for self-regulation. A court can compel a settlement, but cannot make the parties willing to live alongside each other afterward. External homeostasis at the social level depends on internal homeostasis in the individuals participating in these societies. Stable societies require nervous systems capable of recovering from fear, restraining impulse, recognising the emotional states of others, and restoring cooperation after it has been damaged. The deliberate act of contemplation and seeking inner calm, whether through meditation or other means, is the cultivation of a capacity that evolved to enable cooperation at scale.
Organisms are able to detect when equilibrium has been disturbed, and respond in ways that restore it. This capacity goes all the way from the earliest cells that sensed and regulated chemical gradients across their membranes and built up over billions of years, to more advanced autonomic nervous systems that are able to regulate heartbeat, breathing, blood pressure, and metabolism. Social species have taken this capacity still further, and have learned to better regulate relationships. Consciousness, the only way in which we meet the world, likely emerged through successive layers of sensation, self-awareness, regulation, and finally the capacity to understand the perspectives of others (more on this in the book Bacteria to Buddha).
Contemplative practices help us draw greater attention to bodily sensation and away from habitual, reflexive responses. Meditation is sometimes seen as a withdrawal from society, but on the contrary, these practices enable greater participation within it because a person who can regulate themselves is better able to regulate their relationships with others. Meditation is the conscious refinement of training the mind to recognise disequilibrium, before it cascades into conflict and suffering.
Inner contemplation and social cooperation may simply be two expressions of a common evolutionary inheritance for internal and external stability. What they share in common is the ability to notice imbalance and respond through patterned, disciplined adjustment rather than reflexive reaction. Where might this capacity have come from? One could argue that contemplative practice is an exaptation — a capacity that evolved for the purpose of balance, and later, became redirected toward spiritual development. This is similar to how birds evolved to grow feathers to keep warm, but then discovered a new use for them to fly.
As groups of humans became larger and involved more complex relationships, the ability to calm fear, inhibit aggression, tolerate ambiguity, and recover from conflict would have been advantageous to our survival. Therefore, biology and contemplative practices may be more aligned than we realise or acknowledge.
Rather than inventing new capacities, contemplative traditions likely discovered ways of cultivating existing capacities that had developed over millions of years for sensing our environment, in order to sense our own inner states. Perhaps, that is why meditation has been compelling to so many people across cultures through the ages. It speaks to a nervous system shaped over millions of years of evolution, by continually seeking balance within itself so that it can remain connected to others.
Ramanan Laxminarayan is president, One Health Trust and author of the forthcoming book, Bacteria to Buddha: How Cooperation Shaped Consciousness – and Makes Us Human. The views expressed are personal
(This is a Hindustan Times digital exclusive)
