But Nature isn't an entity in the way you're espousing. Nature is a series of adaptations designed to keep the species alive. It's ingrained, not innate.

Kind of the opposite of original sin, I think people are born essentially blank slates. Every second of our existence, we scribble away at that slate, first with huge big swirls and then adding smaller, more complicated patterns between the chalk marks as the space fills up. Though it gets pretty crowded, there's always a bit more space to work with, until time dries out the chalk and it sort of blurs into deteriorating flakes.

But not before other people have seen and been influenced by the markings on your slate. And not before you've taught other people and fed to their experience.

There is no outside entity that lays out our path, except the entity of prior knowledge passed down.

Careful what you wish for, a rhetorical circle

You're always questioning people's ability to change. Stuck between a lefty brain and a righty attitude, you wrestle with the disparity and lash out. The part of your conscious that thinks, that really thinks--not the part that sounds the thoughts, or gives voice to the notions, but rather the deeper instantaneous thought--is at odds with your voice. You're suffering a crisis of Ego, homie, and that's pretty damn cool. Proprioception, awareness of Self--you're thinking about thinking. Seeing that the Ego and the Consciousness are separate subjects is the only way to really be aware. You're on the path to enlightenment--the first step of which is to realize there is no path.

What it comes down to is that the Ego is the front we wear like armor--or like fashion. Choose your simile. It's the consciously crafted work of art that is often mis-named and mistaken for "I". It's been passed along to you from your antecedents--family and otherwise--and much of it has to do with social interaction and self preservation. We become what we're supposed to be, photosynthesizing other humans' expectations. You are the current embodiment of a string of collective conscious, the product of experience clusters. In other words, pure learned behavior--there is no nature.

This isn't such a scary thing as it seems. In fact, pre-ordination, or my understanding of "nature" is far more frightening. Even though I am just the reception of a bunch of other people's experience, that means I am constantly, perhaps infinitely, subject to change. There's no such thing as a reaction I can't control with a delicate series of burning pathways into my brain. You can grow or sever any behavior you want to, because it's all just different degrees of habit. You are basically amorphous, if you can conceive of yourself as just a bunch of neurons and electrical impulses. That's so sweet! You can do whatever you want. You can change or not change, whether in a unilinear fashion that you seem to espouse, or in a chronic cycles spirals ebbs flows and orbits, like how I tend and try to see things.

But the question comes down to what about the entity that thinks the thought? It's so quick, so nearly instantaneous, that it's hard to recognize. We're so used to the sound of the Ego that we disregard the other, deeper, I. Become aware of that eye, and you'll be glimpsing enlightenment. It's not some kind of outside divine flashbulb brought on by any sort of set-out process of asceticism or sacrament or ritual or prescription. It's a process of making that recognition and awareness permanent instead of fleeting. Which, oddly enough, is a strengthening of a habit. Weird.