More on Animism

It helps me to know some basic facts. For example, that everyone is talking all the time; It’s just our society that is deaf to the conversation, and doesn’t cultivate the ability to understand or even hear. Today there are quite a few people in Israel who teach communication with other life forms – birds, plants, animals – but you can also start by listening, noticing that everyone is already conversing. It also helps me to know about the discoveries that trees and fungi in the forest communicate with each other and care for each other, and that the level of complexity of the root system of large trees exceeds the level of complexity of our brains (reports Stephen Harrod Buhner in his wonderful book Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm) , so there is no objective, scientific reason to assume that the intelligence and awareness of trees is less developed than ours. Moreover, their consciousness is not locked inside a skull, but mmersed in unmediated communication with the environment.

Science can help us recognize the basis and the signs of consciousness. (Finally! Again, other cultures knew this a long time ago.) But science also starts from the assumption that we and the world (the phenomenon under study) are separate, that it is possible and obligatory to study and understand all phenomena from an objective position. There are two problems with this. One, there is a huge difference between the physical marker of the phenomenon of consciousness (for example, electrical and chemical activity in the brain) which we can record and study from the outside, and the subjective experience, which can only be understood or even grasped from the inside.

Two, we are not separate. We are emergent property (if you know the translation for this important term, let me know!), of the world. We have no independent existence. We are a result of everything that has happened and is happening on earth ever, physically, but also mentally. Consciousness is built solely out of context. Consciousness strives for connection because it exists only in connection. Without the other types of ‘people’ here – the sun, the trees, the oceans, the microorganisms – we could not exist, not only physically, but also mentally.

Our existence is solely within this entire living and intelligent system. There are intelligences here that are much bigger and more ancient than us. The entire biosphere, which also consists of entire intelligent subsystems (holobionts). Trees, fungi, and bacteria are all more experienced life forms than us and are likely more intelligent in their own way. This does not reduce our value. We are also Gaia’s children. If you want to know what Gaia does for her children, look at what birds, mammals, trees, or we ourselves do for ours.

Everyone here takes care of themselves and also takes care of each other along the way, just as a tree creates the richest soil from fallen leaves and fruits that we see as a nuisance and invest a lot of energy to clean up. Today we also know that forests “call” for rain, both by evaporation and by releasing particles that encourage condensation of drops of the right size to become rain and not just mist. We take all of this – fertile soil, oxygen, rain – for granted, as if these are unrelated to us and our existence is unrelated to them.

Neither is correct, and taking everything for granted, without being attentive and participating ourselves, we have managed to make things like a stable climate not something that can be taken for granted. I find it hard to believe that we can fix it all with more-of-the-same, more technology, more disconnection. Instead, it seems obvious to me that we must develop our ability to care and to hear, and not just utilitarian relationships with the rest of the life-forms – people – living here.