Connected, Reflected, Experiencing Lightness and Sweetness, Knowing

In the 1970's, scientists "discovered" that marine animals produce D-amino acids. I put the word "discovered" in quotes because they were hardly the first to know this: catfish have known, and exploited this fact as a way to sense their world, for hundreds of millions of years.

Galileo famously "invented" the telescope in 1609, but he was unwittingly creating a poor copy of the visual structure of jumping spiders who evolved it millions of years before.

Leading neuroscientist Antonio Damasio states, unequivocally, that bacteria and plants are "intelligent." The fact that they behave in intelligent ways -- turning toward the light, for instance -- is his evidence. Yet many of us discount this intelligence because, while the behavior shows all the hallmarks of intelligence, we do not believe that plants know they are intelligent, and for us modern humans, that makes all the difference. We make the same assumption about catfish, jumping spiders, palm trees, and even our own human babies.

This represents one of the most harmful prejudices of Western culture: we define "knowing" as a purely cognitive function. Perhaps we don't do it consciously, especially with our own babies, but we tend to dismiss most of the world's intelligence as inferior to ours simply because we don't believe that plants, animals, and newborns know that they know. Indeed, even when a plant, animal, or baby behaves in a clearly intelligent way, we dismiss it as mere "instinct," reserving intelligence for ourselves alone.

Other cultures, including many of North America's Indigenous cultures, have traditions of understanding intelligence in a broader sense, ascribing it to all of nature. 

Our Western tradition of asserting "dominion" over nature has separated us from it and this disconnection from nature has set us on a cancerous path.

"There is now compelling evidence that our elders were right, " writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in her masterpiece book Braiding Sweetgrass, "the trees are talking to one another. They communicate via pheromones, hormone like compound that are wafted on the breeze, laden with meaning." Our cultural prejudice causes the Western mind scoff -- "C'mon, trees don't know they are communicating" -- but the trees have been talking in this way for millions of years, while the meager and limited vocalizations we call language only emerged a few hundred thousand years ago, a blink of an eye in the larger scheme of things.

When our babies turn toward us to suckle, when they cry out for connection, when they seek out the eyes of others, they are behaving intelligently. They are born talking to us, clearly, precisely, letting us know exactly what they need, yet we've become so disconnected that we are often confounded and confused by what they're saying.

Western science, that effort to overcome mere instinct, is, as Kimmerer writes, "rigorous in separating the observer from the observed, and the observed from the observer." It is an active, overt attempt to disconnect ourselves, to seek some sort of objective, third person perspective that holds true for all things for all times. But as the catfish know, as the jumping spiders know, as the plants and babies know, nothing exists outside of its relationship with the rest of the world. Or at least that is, in a nutshell, the theory being pursued by physicists like Carlo Rovelli.

"(W)e have access only to perspectives," writes Rovelli, "Reality is perhaps nothing other than perspectives. There is no absolute. We are limited, impermanent, and precisely for this reason, to live, to be, as we do, is so light and sweet." In Rovelli's view of the universe, we find that the only place where measurements and observations yield definitive results is in our own subjective experience. We live in a web of relations and when we seek to consider anything outside of those relationships, when we engage in the arrogance of knowing that we know, we disconnect, leaving us farther and farther from the truth . . . Or at least farther from this moment's truth. The question, Rovelli says, is not "What is the state of affairs?" but rather, "How will an object manifest itself next?" What we observe and experience is not a reflection of a world that exited before us, nor will it exist afterward. The observation or experience you are having right now is all there is.

Catfish and jumping spiders, and babies know this without knowing they know it. 

Yesterday, I watched a year old baby, unsteadily walking along the sidewalk in front of my home. The mocking birds have recently returned and they were filling the air with their magnificently varied and cacophonous song. The baby stopped in her tracks, her eyes turned toward a tree that was singing. "You hear the birds," her parents said, before urging her to move along toward the car. But the baby didn't move. She was far too intelligent for that. And, thankfully, so were her parents who left her to stand in the midst of life, connected, reflected, experiencing lightness and sweetness, knowing.

******

    

After three printings, we are getting to the end of our book supply and it's unlikely that we'll print more. We've shipped what's left to Amazon, so here's your last chance to get your copy of Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book. 

"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!