The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind

Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

What is the nature of mind? What is the mind of Nature? We inquire into some radical and revolutionary aspects of mind and ecological thinking.

The Mind of Nature and the Nature of Mind

Part 2 in an Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow to Sophia.

At the beginning of every episode we mention the mind of Nature and the nature of mind. We’re going to get at those more explicitly in this contemplation. We will look at them a little more scientifically, but still with rootedness in wisdom.

This is our second episode on ecological thinking, and things are going to get easier and more familiar as we go along, even if we also introduce some subtle and profound ways of thinking.

We are all so busy, and we may feel we have no time or interest in ecological thinking, but we are ecological beings, so ecological thinking is our birthright and an ethical imperative. Resisting it means resisting what we are.

In this series, we’ll get to the heart of some exceptionally important ideas, ideas that can begin to shift our perception and action in the world, helping us live better, love better, and realize the fullest potentials of ourselves and our world.

In our last contemplation, we defined an ecology as a relative wholeness that consists of relative parts or elements, each of which can affect the behavior or activity of the wholeness as well as the behavior or activity of the other relative parts or elements. The relational nature of an ecology means ecologies exhibit interwovenness, which means lots of responsive connections. While each relative element of an ecology manifests a certain degree of relative autonomy, each relative element can only affect other elements or affect the whole in dependence upon other elements.

The interwovenness we speak of as a basic aspect of reality, and thus a quality of all ecologies. But the interwovenness is so important that we could revise our definition to say that an ecology is a relative wholeness constituted by an interwovenness of relative parts. That’s the sense of responsive connections.

That interwovenness will transcend the conventional boundaries we might at first place around an ecology We will go into that a little further later in our inquiry.

Remember that our definition differentiates an ecology from a mere aggregate. If we throw a bunch of rocks into a pile, we have an aggregate, but not a functioning ecology. We think of the rocks as having a physical relationship, but we don’t think of the rocks as responsive to information from one another.

We can add here that a fundamental activity of ecologies is making themselves in an ongoing dynamism. This further differentiates them from aggregates. You won’t one day open the silverware drawer to find the forks have eaten some of the spoons, and that they then grew larger and produced baby forks which were in turn eating more spoons. But living ecologies must continually make themselves, and they do this by means of the principles we will outline in this series.

We noted the radical nature of an ecology: Each relative element of an ecology can only affect other elements or the whole in dependence upon other elements. This means no part of an ecology has total “dominion” over the whole, and the whole thing arises as mutual interdependence.

The relative elements arise fully interwoven or interdependent, and we can say an ecology arises as a wholeness we cannot actually divide into elements that exist independently (or, exist “from their own side,” so to speak).

Our definition of an ecology evokes wholeness. And we noted this wholeness is a more subtle notion than we may realize.

We can also give a slightly more detailed definition of an ecology, drawing from the work of Gregory Bateson. Bateson gives 6 criteria for ecologies which we will adapt slightly for our purposes. You can find these in his book, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity.

As we consider these 6 criteria, you can sense our more paired down definition within them, but you can also clearly sense how these criteria pull out a lot of details we only have implicitly included in our more basic definition.

Here are Bateson’s six criteria that an ecology must meet in order to be an ecology rather than a mere assemblage:

1. An ecology is a relative wholeness consisting of relative parts, and none of the parts can influence the whole or any of the other parts except in dependence upon other parts and the whole. That’s actually our way of putting his first criterion, and it matches our definition. Again, we have adapted these a little from Bateson’s presentation, but this is the essence of his first criterion.

2. The interactions between parts of an ecology are triggered by difference, and difference is a nonsubstantial phenomenon not located in space or time; (difference is related to negentropy and entropy rather than to energy). That’s kind of profound. Ecologies unfold on the basis of something that has no location, but is itself relational. We can all this meaning.

Meaning doesn’t exist somewhere in space or time, and we cannot grab hold of it. Rather, meaning arises as part of relationality. Bateson uses the idea of difference because we can only detect meaning in relative difference. You have to hear these words as words, and not as a bunch of noise.

Absence also can have a meaning, even though it doesn’t exist in the way we think of things existing. So, if I send you a letter, that letter could have a physical impact, and thus a linear kind of causal relation. It’s an object. But, if I fail to send you a letter you hoped to receive, that has a meaning. So, you wanted the difference of going from not having my letter to having my letter. But you also register the nonappearance of any difference, and that makes a difference to you. So, while a zero cannot have a physical effect, it can have an ecological affect.

We have here an incredibly radical suggestion, because it shifts ecological thinking out of the material and into the meaningful. Some ecologists and many other kinds of scientists treat our world as constituted by material energy flows. But a living world operates on the basis of flows of meaning, not flows of physical energy.

We can’t pretend physical energy doesn’t exist, but living systems are alive because they respond to meaning, and not merely to force. This idea has some wondrous implications, including the implication that we can overcome power by overcoming the use of the metaphor of power.

We find a lot of discourse about power, and countless stories about power seduce us into believing in power. Then we think we have to fight against those who have power.

But power is a metaphor—a metaphor that keeps us locked in a bad way of knowing ourselves, each other, and our world. Discussions of power in politics, culture, and our personal life end up indoctrinating us into a mechanistic universe. That sort of universe isn’t alive and alove—but we are.

The way out of power dynamics is a shift of metaphor. We free ourselves by means of meaning, not by means of force.

3. Ecological processes require collateral energy. In other words, if I throw a crumpled piece of paper at a wall, the wall doesn’t move. If I throw a crumpled piece of paper at a very sheer piece of fabric, the fabric may sway a bit, but only as far as the energy of the paper can move it.

However, if I throw a crumpled piece of paper at a dog, the dog may jump up and start playing. The energy of the dog’s response comes from the dog as an ecology. Ecologies produce and release energy, while crumpled pieces of paper don’t. Ecologies engage in the process of metabolism.

4. Ecological processes require circular (or even more complex) processes of determination. They must have more than linear chains, and their circular processes transcend conventional boundaries around the ecologies.

On a billiard table, I strike the cue ball, the cue ball strikes the 8 ball, and the 8 ball goes into the corner pocket. That’s a linear chain.

But, then, I get hungry, and I eat food that my body uses to make the very parts of itself that signal hunger and make eating possible. That’s a loop or circular process. This point relates to the way parts can only influence each other in an interwoven way, with each part dependent on other parts and on the whole.

But it also illustrates a key aspect of the way the relations work in an ecology: They unfold recursively. Recursion is a key characteristic of ecologies. And we can see how human beings ignore this aspect, and ignore the fullness of these loops.

For instance. this loop or circular process of hunger should include an aspect in which the human metabolizes the food and then excretes in such a way that more food can grow—that’s a recursive loop, because it comes back to itself. And there we can see rather starkly one of the problems with our way of thinking: namely, that we do not give back to the ecologies we depend on. We have closed off that loop, cutting ourselves off from ourselves, not seeing the interwovenness and the recursiveness of our ecologies.

We do this in a variety of ways in our consumer culture because we extract from all over the place. If you look at any given nation, especially in what we refer to as the developed economies, most of the things we use on a daily basis aren’t made where we live, or even in our nation.

We use our phone, we use our laptop, we use our cars, and some of these things we use daily or depend on them heavily. But those things are not produced where we live. They come from ecologies far away, and we don’t have a vitalizing loop back into those ecologies.

We don’t have a lifestyle and livelihood in which we actively cultivate relationships with local ecologies, bring something into being, and give back to those ecologies, furthering them along in the process. We don’t live so as to make life itself more possible right where we live, or even in general.

This happens when we eat as well. We eat, and we may have taken that food from very far away, from a place where we have no vitalizing loops feeding back into the full living ecologies. And then after we metabolize that food, we don’t give back, so that the ecologies can continue to grow. Instead, we flush it away.

So we practice cutting and closing off complex loops, circles, spirals, and fractals, and that degrades the very mind of our world. We need better practices of life, practices that cultivate the whole of life onward.

5. In ecological processes, the effects of difference are regarded as transformations (i.e., coded versions) of events which preceded them. The rules of such transformation must be comparatively stable (i.e., more stable than the content) but are themselves subject to transformation.

The idea here is that you are not hearing sound waves right now. Rather, you hear my voice. And if we replace you with someone who doesn’t speak English, the exact same soundwaves produce zero meaning.

6. The description and classification of these processes of transformation disclose a hierarchy of logical types immanent in the phenomena. That’s a more complicated point we will go into some other time. But, for now, let’s just say that dogs know the difference between play fighting and real fighting, and that’s because, as ecologies, they implicitly recognize context.

Sometimes we hear dogs playing and the growling sounds scary, but they know the context. And they can shift context too.

I once saw a video of a dog in Alaska who engaged in play behavior with a polar bear. The polar bear could have just killed and eaten the dog, and the dog could have freaked out and tried to attack the bear. Perhaps the dog knew there was only one gambit in the situation. In any case, the bear played with the dog for quite some time, and then moved on.

Okay, those ideas function as six criteria for ecologies.

Here’s a very, very, very important point: These criteria apply not only to ecologies, but also to thinking, evolution, learning, and life in general, and these things only arise in systems that satisfy these criteria. In fact, Bateson initially offers these as 6 criteria for mind, and then he adds that they apply to thinking, ecologies, evolution, learning, and life in general.

That means ecologies are minds, and minds are ecologies, and it means ecologies think, that ecologies depend on learning and communication, and that evolution itself is a mental process.

Let that sink in, because it’s rather startling, and it’s central to our inquiry into ecological thinking.

Not many of us have really considered this basic unity, this basic identity of mind, ecology, evolution, life, and learning. And it means that—in this very inquiry—we are thinking about thinking, and we are learning about learning as we go along. Isn’t that remarkable?

In our original definition and discussion, we emphasized wholeness and interwovenness. Bateson does too. The wholeness and interwovenness that characterize the basic nature of the Cosmos is alive and alove, which means it has a dynamism. That dynamism means impermanence, a constant flow and flux.

We can call wholeness, interwovenness, and dynamism the core aspects of reality. These core aspects of reality give rise to four major characteristics of ecologies that we can find rather difficult at times to fully accept and work with: precariousness, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. The acronym for that is PUCA (pronounced “pucka”). These characteristics arise directly from the core aspects of the nature of reality.

We noted that resistance, denial, or active misknowing in relation to any of these characteristics gives rise to suffering.

Last time, we touched on precariousness, uncertainty, and complexity. Actually, we maybe need to say something more about complexity, and then move on to ambiguity.

Complexity means a few things. In one sense, complexity does double duty here, because ecological thinking means complexity thinking. An ecology is a complex system, and complexity science describes living systems.

But we have subordinated this mathematical term complexity to make it a feature of ecologies rather than a mere synonym for ecologies. We mean that ecologies aren’t strictly predictable by our old linear mathematics and our habitual conquest consciousness.

Linear mathematics allows us to make a calculation that predicts the future or in some way empowers our habits of manipulation and control. By means of linear mathematics, we can calculate exactly how to land a rocket ship on the moon, or land a little rover on the planet Mars. To us, this seems like the height of power and knowledge.

But living systems don’t function in accord with that kind of math. They are nonlinear, which means we have to find some other way to understand how they will unfold.

We find that a change we make to these systems has sometimes surprising consequences. And the complexity means we can’t always deal with those consequences easily.

Recently I spoke with ecologist Carl Safina about his book, Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. Carl’s book is a beautiful work of philosophy, so look for that dialogue which will come out soon, and also check out his book.

Thanks to Carl, I started reading a book by Evan T. Pritchard. Pritchard is a descendant of the Micmac people, part of the Algonquin nations, and is the founder of the Center for Algonquin Culture. I had already started Pritchard’s book, No Word for Time, which reflects on Algonquin culture. But Safina cites another work by Pritchard in his book, Alfie and Me.

That other book by Pritchard is called, Native New Yorkers, and it, too, is about Algonquin culture. I’d like to share a passage from Pritchard’s book that bears on our inquiry together. Pritchard writes the following, from an Algonquin storyteller named Ken Little Hawk, of the Micmac people:

In this story, a young half-Indian boy kept asking his full-blooded grandfather, “Teach me to be an Indian! Teach me to be an Indian!” After some weeks, Grandfather finally promised to teach him. He brought the boy to the edge of a beautiful lake, with clear, still waters. He gave the boy a big stick, and he said, take this to the edge of the lake and stir the water up real good.”

The boy did so. The Grandfather encouraged the boy to stir up the stones, sand, and even the plants that grew under the water. The boy, being a boy, was happy to do so, and soon the water was a cloudy mess of leaves and mud and sand and little bits of shell whirling around. The boy stepped back to admire his work. After the cloudy water began to clear, Grandfather said to the boy, “Now I want you to put everything back exactly as it was before.” The boy looked at his grandfather with wonder and said, “I cannot do that! It can never be the same! What is this anyway? I thought you were going to teach me to be an Indian!” “Yes,” Grandfather answered, “but before you learn what it is to be an Indian, you first need to learn what it is to be a human being.”

This story illustrates some basic problems with conquest consciousness—problems we all have to face. If we imagine that becoming an Indigenous person means learning skillful ecological thinking, we can see our initial challenge: We must muster up all our humility, and acknowledge that we haven’t fully accepted that we are human beings, and thus that we are ecological beings.

We have so much hubris that we separate ourselves from the world, in a very, very subtle and deep way. We are above the world, and so we can intervene as we like.

Conquest consciousness knows how to stir things up, and it even takes pride in doing so. We think of ourselves as bold cowboys or brave explorers, and we think ourselves willing to take big risks. But we amount to nothing more than ignorant children wielding sticks, stirring things up that we do not understand, without the intimate sense that they have their own ordering to them, and we cannot put them back once we transgress against that ordering. This is the meaning of hierarchy: The world consists of a sacred ordering, and we must respect that.

This story expresses the complexity of ecologies, but it does so as much by implication as by illustration. The implicit complexity has to do with the large, recursive loops by means of which ecologies think, learn, and evolve.

Spiritually speaking, complexity reminds us that we often become far more predictable than Nature. We become rather rigid in our habits and reactions, and we lose the spontaneous creativity that characterizes more vitalizing ecologies.

Finally, we come to ambiguity. We have ambiguity because of the fact that we have no absolute ground under our feet, and thus, in any given situation, we don’t have an absolute ground for interpretation. This does NOT leave everything completely up for grabs.

But it does mean we find ambiguity, even in places that make us feel uncomfortable, and it also means we live in a world abundant with cognitive diversity, which means perceptual diversity, diversity action, and ultimately a diversity of worlds. Our world is a world of totally interwoven worlds. That’s a very deep suggestion that we might get to later on in our inquiry.

But let’s emphasize again that the fact that we don’t have any absolute ground to stand on doesn’t mean that everything becomes a postmodern catastrophe. It just means that there isn’t an absolute, and we find creativity and discernment active in every moment.

We need to fully grok the implications here. This kind of precariousness, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity also mean that life will resist manipulation and control. We don’t have to organize society in such a way that we try to maximize certainty and stability in a more rigid sense.

We can achieve relative stability, and we can learn how to properly rely on one another. We can create a culture that roots us in wisdom, love, and beauty so that we become wise, compassionate, and graceful beings who can trust themselves and each other, and who can relate skillfully with our ecologies so that we can rely on those ecologies and they can rely on us.

But we will never eliminate all the precariousness, we will never eliminate all the uncertainty, we will never eliminate all the ambiguity, and we cannot eliminate the complexity or the impermanence. All of this falls out of the wholeness and interwovenness.

We need to repeat this often: We can’t make the world an object that we know. Therefore, in any situation, some aspect of life remains inherently precarious and uncertain. Life itself doesn’t operate at equilibrium, because equilibrium would mean death.

When we say life operates away from equilibrium, it doesn’t mean life arises out-of-balance, or that beings cannot achieve equanimity. It means we cannot stabilize everything, because the nature of Nature includes dynamism.

Life arises as movement and change. The dynamic flow and flux together with wholeness and interwovenness mean we can’t have certainty and we can’t have a solid ground under our feet. But if we look with care, we find our ego keeps trying to get that ground under its feet in any way it can. This process creates suffering for us and for all beings. When we consider this in relation to our economic system, we can see the profound spiritual and ecological flaw of that system.

When we go against the very nature of life, by trying to make a world in which we live as beings with the whole planet as our niche, and in which we allow the abstraction of money to create a buffer against reality—economics as an artificial ecology, a system that lives like a vampire off of the real flesh and blood ecologies we depend on—that means we’ve tried to manipulate and control things in extraordinarily deluded ways. We’ve considered many of these issues in blog posts and other episodes of the Dangerous Wisdom podcast.

For instance, we’ve spoken about how industrialized bread stands out as an excellent example of ecological and spiritual ignorance. The industrial process makes flour much less impermanent, but it also yields less nutritious bread. But we have become dependent on this practice of trying to stabilize flour, and it goes together with industrial agriculture, which we could call invasive agriculture, or conquest agriculture.

We have also considered how we manipulate and control things so we can fly something or someone thousands of miles in a matter of hours. That gives us a kind of stability and certainty, and we start to depend on that stability and certainty in rigid ways.

I know that if I mail this package, it’s going to get to you by tomorrow morning. And there’s this kind of delusion of manipulation and control in that way of relating to life. It might be subtle to notice at first, because it involves a style of consciousness.

When we operate in that style of consciousness, when we dance that kind of herky-jerk dance, life will respond back, and its response will let us know we have gone against the music, that we have gone against the very character of the world, the very character of the Cosmos.

We also see our insanity in discussions about sustainable business, climate change, fossil fuels, and so-called renewable fuels. Consider that latter notion: Renewable energy. Is there such a thing?

“Energy” is an abstraction in the dominant culture. Everything we have comes from the Earth and the living loving ecologies that constitute our world. We cannot have energy without extraction. No energy is truly renewable except in the concrete ways ecologies renew themselves.

Humans don’t know renewal the way Nature does. We need to admit that we are human beings, that we are ecological beings, and then we can do the real work of reindigenizing ourselves, by means of skillful ecological thinking. Humility comes first.

And note that we questioned the meaning of energy. Ecologies operate on the basis of meaning, not energy. We might find a radical way out of our energy problems if we start with meaning.

From the perspective of wisdom, all our talk about reducing emissions emerges as part of our own insanity. Carbon isn’t the problem. The problem has to do with our entire way of life, our style of consciousness, our lifestyles, our livelihoods. Our way of life doesn’t simply produce carbon emissions or any other kind of abstract and fragmented concept. Rather, our way of life currently degrades the ecologies we depend on to live. We poison the water, air, and soil. We degrade the soil, we waste the water, we trample the web of life.

We find contradictions at the center of the way we’ve organized culture and even the way we’ve organized our science, which seeks certainty as opposed to attunement with spiritual and ecological realities. That should tell us a lot: Our science, like our economic and business endeavors, seeks data and certainty rather than insight and attunement, it seeks a confused objectivity rather than sacred participation, a participation in reverence—a participation that can cultivate the whole of life onward.

That attunement has to begin with us. We have to clear our mind. That matters more than anything else. We’ve got to get that right again. We’ve got to get our minds clear so that we can deal with the inherent precariousness, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, wholeness, and interwovenness.

That would be the goal of a holistic science, a Gaia Scienza: Clarity of mind and attunement, so we can gracefully work with holism and interwovenness, in ways that cultivate the whole of life onward. That’s what we’re moving toward in our contemplation together.

Recall again that we can define an ecology as a relative wholeness constituted by an interwovenness of relative parts or elements, each of which can affect the behavior or activity of the wholeness as well as the behavior or activity of the other relative elements. While each relative element of an ecology manifests a certain degree of relative autonomy, each relative element can only affect other elements or affect the whole in dependence upon other elements, and typically in recursive loops. Ecologies think, learn, and communicate, which depends on a flow of meaning, and not just a flow of physical forces.

We repeat the definition so we can get used to it. It’s potentially a good thing to memorize, as are Bateson’s six criteria.

We should clearly acknowledge that human cultures and the places where they abide arise as ecologies. Even a single human being arises as an ecology, and in fact arises nested or interwoven with other ecologies.

You may have heard the oft-repeated statistic that a human body consists mostly of non-human cells. Estimates vary, but typical calculations put the number of human cells at somewhere around 30-37 trillion cells, and the number non-human cells at least 50% of the total cells. In other words, we might have 30 trillion human cells and 38 trillion nonhuman cells.

We have trillions and trillions of non-human bacteria, viruses, and fungi on the inside and outside of our body, with the number of viruses potentially reaching into the hundreds of trillions. Those are incredible numbers, and our human cells are exceptionally outnumbered, especially when we include the viruses.

In general we humans are composed completely of non-human elements, including carbon, hydrogen, and so on. Think about that: Human beings consist completely of non-human elements.

It may help to emphasize that our very development and functioning depend on these non-human cells, such that, without them, we could not live, and if we were to suddenly lose them, we would die. We can see this on both individual and vast evolutionary time scales.

On an evolutionary timescale, we have discovered in the past few years some extraordinary things. For instance, a virus that infected animals hundreds of millions of years ago has become essential for the development of embryos. So, your development in utero happened as it did because of a virus.

Similarly, a virus established our memory pathways as well. We remember as we do because of a virus that became involved with our ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago.

The sorts of factors operate in our smaller timescales as well. One interesting example of this appeared recently in immunotherapy for cancer. In trying to understand why roughly 20% of patients responded incredibly well to immunotherapy, and why 80% did not, researchers in Europe found the bacteria Akkermansia muciniphila correlated strongly. If we inherit this bacteria, and if we eat things like pomegranates and grapes, we grow more of these bacteria, and it alters our immune system, helping us to overcome cancer.

In another example, we can recall that our gastro-intestinal tract is lined with villi. These are teeny, tiny fingerlike projections all along the GI tract—anywhere from 6,000-25,000 per square inch. And each villus has many microvilli, as many as 600.

These villi and microvilli vastly expand the surface area of our GI tract, and they are essential for absorbing nutriment from our food. If you have no bacteria in your gut, you will not develop these villi. The very structural development and function of our digestion depends on the presence of non-human cells.

And this means that, to the extent that we can somehow speak of a genetic code—and that concept has problems, because information itself arises as a developmental process—but to the extent that we can speak of a genetic code, that code doesn’t direct our development as a process of building the structures we call villi. Rather, our genes must somehow guide our pattern of relating with non-human cells, in such a way that this relationship produces the possibility for effective digestion. And we can see how many ways this can go wrong.

Let’s take just a moment to contemplate the idea many of us get implanted into us that our genes consist of a genetic code, or that our genes somehow have information in them. This amounts to a ghost in the machine.

When we inquire and contemplate a little further, we discover that the gene arises as relational—the gene arises as relationality that mediates further relationality. We don’t have pre-given genetic information, and then that just gets read out and appears in the world by magic of Disney.

But we practice a way of knowing, being, living, and loving that gets us to think of it this way, and it can feel pretty radical to let go of that. In fact, we must understand skillful ecological thinking as a radical transformation in the sense of a transformation down at the root.

This transformation involves a sense of information itself having a developmental path.

Information has an ontogeny, an ontogenesis.

That means there isn’t pre-given information in the world. Rather, what we refer to as “information” has to do with the dance of relationality, and it has to do with the way that dance unfolds, and what becomes meaningful in the dance and possible in the dance.

What becomes possible in the dance depends on how the dance gets danced. That applies to us as human beings too.

We don’t live in a world that has some abstract thing called information lying about, and then we go dig it up. The world doesn’t work like that.

In our world and in our Cosmos, we become the kinds of beings who can dance certain kinds of dance. The dance of a sage differs from the dance of an ordinary ignorant person. And in the dancing of the sage, they allow for information to emerge that otherwise wouldn’t emerge.

“Information” sounds like a technical term, because of the way our culture teaches us to dance. We need to remember that this has to do with informing. It has to do with the shapes the world takes, the shapes the being and the beings of the world take.

This informing process is very concrete, not abstract like a string of ones and zeros or a string of letters in a “genetic code”. When we think of information, we need to think with intimacy and concreteness, and we need to think of patterning in relation to a matrix, and then further think of patterning and matrix in relationship to knowing or gnosis.

The patterning has an informing quality, and this has to do with the Platonic and archetypal dimension of space and time, and also biology and psychology. And then we have some kind of a matrix, some kind of an implicate order, which contains vast potential. It is potentiality that becomes actualized.

That implicit or implicate order an explicate order dependent upon our development as beings. And, so, when a sage dances the dance, new things become possible. And this becoming shapes culture, that is, it informs culture.

And that means it informs all of life. It informs Nature and Culture in nonduality, because both Nature and Culture learn something about what is possible with human embodiment interwoven into the world. Nature and Culture learn from our mystics, our visionaries, our sages, our priestesses, our saints, our sky dancers—all these beings teach us about possibilities for this dance of relationality.

That’s how nature works. It’s how evolution works. Evolution works as this dance, as this constantly-finding-out-what-might-be-possible, which then gives shape to what we refer to as ecologies, the environment, the soil, the plants growing there. All of it emerges from this dance of relationality, which is sheer openness from one perspective and from another perspective is endless realizations of skill.

When the spider wasp stings a spider so precisely that the spider gets paralyzed but not killed, that’s an extraordinary display of skill. It’s a realization of a skill. And it gets learned in an ecology of mind.

What we refer to as genes actually constitutes part of the learning process of Nature and Culture. It’s the activity of learning in Wasp culture and Spider culture and all the other cultures that constitute what we refer to as Nature. And we don’t learn information as a string of ones and zeros, or as a code, or as any other kind of abstraction.

Learning has a relational soul. It has only to do with relationality, and that’s why we can properly define wisdom skillful as interwovenness, a definition we need to emphasize.

We have only begun to begin, but as we scale up everything we have considered so far, we can already sense that we do not live “on” the Earth, and we do not live “in” the Earth. Rather, we live as the Earth. In this life, in this embodiment, are the living loving Earth. And in every embodiment, we are the living loving mystery, the living loving Cosmos.

Everything is like this. Everything arises as interwoven ecologies—everything arises as interwoven interwovenness.

Again we try to recognize that mind itself is ecological. That’s already a profound thing. But, it gets weirder, because we cannot confine our mind to our skull or our skin. Its ecological nature arises with the total interwovenness of the world.

What a shocking suggestion, when we really let it sink in: We cannot confine our mind to our skull or our skin.

Therefore, we cannot confine ourselves to our skull or our skin. We arise as interwovenness, and the functioning of mind arises beyond the boundaries of the skin. We see this most wondrously in experiences of synchronicity and magic, which rupture the barriers of time, space, and identity that we project onto the world.

Again, this should give us pause, and yet I see time and time again the many ways people try to resist this, and the many rationalizations they employ in relation to it, so as to preserve their delusion of sovereignty. Jung saw this as well. In his essay on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, he wrote the following:

Whether primitive or not, mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war, to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind, and the gods, as ever, show it the ways of fate. Today we call the gods “factors,” which comes from facere, ‘to make.’ The makers stand behind the wings of the world-theatre. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the ‘factors’ themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously-guarded supremacy of consciousness . . . is questioned in the most dangerous way. (CW 9i: 49)

It may not at first seem scary to seriously contemplate the powers that live themselves through us. But those who have experienced such things often experience fear.

Think of what dangerous wisdom, what threatening wisdom, Jung presents us with. Based on his own work as a psychologist who worked with hundreds of clients and students, and based on his experience as a psychonaut who went into the human psyche to explore it, and also based on his extensive research in Philosophy—including Alchemy, Gnosticism, mythology, anthropology, and ancient Greek philosophy and culture—he tells us that, while at a conscious level, we clearly experience ourselves as our own masters, the real makers of the world remain hidden to us.

If we step through the gateway of our own psyche to explore and inquire and investigate, we discover that we are the objects of powers and causes we cannot control and do not understand. As W.H. Auden put it so well: We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

We need to make two things clear: Those powers are immanent, not transcendent in the limited sense. They transcend our ego, but they do not arise in some kind of absolute separation from us. We ourselves are those powers, but our ego most certainly is not in control of them or identifiable with them.

Secondly, we must make no mistake about something else: We do pretend to understand, and our ego often does try to identify with these powers. We cannot tolerate the discomfort of recognizing fully that we do not understand, and something in us experiences terror at the thought of these powers revealing themselves, because they are in some deep sense totally different from our habitual mind. They do seem like a radical otherness.

These two issues lead us to consider here the words of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. We have considered Jung and Ortega y Gasset in other contemplations, but the mandala of the mind works this way: It’s holographic, and when we spiral around to see an element of the mandala in a new way, it can help us arrive at insight. Passages like these can function like medicine if we allow them.

In his book Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gasset wrote:

Take stock of those around you and you will see them wandering about lost through life, like sleep-walkers in the midst of their good or evil fortune, without the slightest suspicion of what is happening to them. You will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to their having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of their own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but they are frightened at finding themselves face to face with this terrible reality, and they try to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry them that their “ideas” are not true, they use them as trenches for the defense of their existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.

What a powerful passage: Our ideas are scarecrows we use to frighten away reality—and not just “ideas” in the abstract, but our agendas, our projects, our arguments, our artworks, our parenting, our earnings, our concepts, our identities, our politics, our corporations, our laws, our relationships, our addictions, our aversions, our endless distractions . . . all scarecrows to frighten away reality.

Ortega y Gasset resonates here with the Socratic imperative, the imperative of attending to the soul and healing ourselves and our world. All wisdom traditions recognize this imperative.

Socrates went around trying to show people that, although they might speak as if they knew a thing or two, they behaved as if asleep in their own lives. He recognized that their ignorance—though invisible to them—would lead the culture as a whole into ruin.

Socrates understood that, from the perspective of their ego or their habitual consciousness, the people he spoke with saw themselves as their own masters—as sovereign individuals. And they felt confident their ideas could stand up to scrutiny—that their ideas weren’t scarecrows at all, but were nuggets of wisdom.

Socrates saw through the façade, and he worked carefully to dismantle some of their ideas and reveal some of their ignorance. But engaging in that process created a grave threat to his fellow citizens: the threat that reality might step in and show itself, the threat that those powers and causes that usually remain hidden might come into the light.

In his presence and his questioning, Socrates threatened to reveal to people that their ideas, opinions, beliefs, and supposed knowledge and vision all functioned to keep reality away. Socrates threatened them with reality, and so they killed him.

If you would like to go through some of this in a little more detail, start with our previous contemplation called “Apocalyptic LoveWisdom”. For now, we just want to acknowledge that ecological thinking demands a recognition of our ecological nature, and that doesn’t always sit well with us, nor is it easy to fully understand.

We may find it easy to admit we have a microbiome inside our bodies and crawling all over our skin. We may find it much more uncomfortable to acknowledge how that microbiome may influence how we feel, what we think, what we say, and how we act.

And then we may find it all the more uncomfortable to acknowledge the fullness of what Jung suggests: That our psyche itself has an ecological character. Just admitting the existence of unconscious factors means admitting the existence of unconscious origins of our actions, our thoughts, and our words. We say and do things that we may try to explain on a conscious level as the activity of our choice, but from a more holistic perspective that may not hold up at all.

In other words, Chun Siong Soon and colleagues discovered that they could look at what was going on in a participant’s brain, and the reliably predict ten seconds before the participant claimed to make a conscious choice that they would make a conscious choice.

That’s huge. Let’s try to picture it.

Imagine that I put you in a brain scanner and ask you to make a choice—let’s say to push a button. You choose for yourself, under your own control of when the action will happen. So you lay there in the scanner, and you suddenly decide, “Now” and you push the button. It feels like a choice to you, and you chose in that moment—the moment that felt like “now”.

Meanwhile, I’m in the other room with the scientists observing. And, at the moment you think you have decided, a full ten seconds have passed since one of the scientists observing with me in the other room said to me, “The choice has been made, and in about ten seconds, this little ego will try and take credit for it. Watch as the little ego says, ‘Now.’” And that’s what happens: ten seconds later, ‘you’ say, “Now,” and ‘you’ push the button, thinking you had conscious control.

And that’s only a small aspect of the ecology of mind, a narrow experiment that should open us up to a sense of wonder for how our living loving world actually functions.

For those who get technical about these things, our scanners can’t yet process all of this in real time, but the data clearly show this huge gap between conscious choice and the activity in the larger ecology of mind. Looking at the data, we really can predict your supposed conscious choice ten seconds before you make it.

We’ve taken the time to emphasize this because too little discussion about these matters makes these sorts of things clear. Ecological thinking is incredibly intimate, and it applies directly to our experience of life, at times in ways that can provoke discomfort.

Let’s try to keep these issues in mind as we go a little further. For now, we’ve earned a break. So contemplate all these things deeply, and if you have questions send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.