Ecological Intelligence (19 page)

I
n summary, to acknowledge a mindfield is to be aware of the dance of atoms around us and within us and to have a sense of being in conversation with these invisible aspects of our existence. It is to give synchronicity a face that is both evolutionary and immediate. It is to wake up to the fact that we are creatures in a universe about which we know so little, that the vast fields of dark matter and dark energy are not out there in deep space, but that we are in it and of it and that each one of us can make a difference to the world in which we find ourselves. It is therefore, more than anything, an attitude: one that is open to choosing the hard path, the one that E. O. Wilson calls the path of “volitional evolution.” This is the difficult path of those who have decided to do something about their heredity and their fate and who are committed to playing their part faithfully.

Our task is to rediscover ourselves in Nature and the only way to do this, I believe, is to make the mindfield livable. Clearly, this is an individual choice. We either continue to believe that someone or something else will rescue us, show us the easy way, or even take the hard path on our behalf, or we choose the opposite—we take it upon ourselves. We take the hard path, each one of us, in our own way, and we take it gladly. And where or when does that path begin? It begins exactly where we are right now, when we look up to see the world as a mirror; when we discover that our sense of freedom and authenticity is linked to the well-being and authenticity of others—and that includes the animals, the trees, and the land. It begins when we are open to synchronicity without pretending to control it. This is what living in a mindfield is about.

Finally, does all of this imply that an ecological intelligence and one’s personal notions of God are mutually exclusive? If anything, surely, it is the opposite. To me, the creative forces of the universe are neither distant nor impersonal. Are we not, every one of us, living expressions of these forces? As Jacquetta Hawkes reminds us, we are hardly more cut off from Nature than is a naked flame from the surrounding exchange of gases and moisture that sustain it. It would appear that every living creature is united both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life.

However, let us not be victims of wishful thinking. Whilst it is impossible to participate in our own fate without a deep sense of awe and gratitude for the forces of creation and evolution, it is important that we accept the great indifference of Nature. It does not exist to punish or to bless us; it is neither cruel nor loving, but we, the human animal, can choose not to be indifferent. We can choose to reach out, to take care, and to love.

LOOKING AHEAD

It is here, it seems, that we get fleeting glimpses of strange shadows
just beneath the surface of current understanding.

Lyall Watson

7

THE BLIND SPOTS

T
HE NOTION OF AN ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE, OF LIVING IN A MINDFIELD, and of the need for a poetic language—all for the purpose of a deeper awareness of the multifaceted relationship between humans and Nature—may sound appealing and even logical, but it is going to require rhetoric as well as logic, and that is not an easy task. I use the word
rhetoric
in its classical oratory sense—the art of persuasive language, the art of influencing the one who hears. To some, the notion may be too far-fetched, not in keeping with conventional wisdom and, in all probability, too difficult to apply.

D
on’t be surprised if, in some instances, the resistance to what the poets have been trying to say is as dismissive as it was about Galileo’s moons. Change is always unsettling and often threatening, but we must not shy away from it. We must face up not only to the mounting environmental pressures of our time, but to the nagging internal pressures also—the ones that urge us to come to terms with the significance and responsibilities of what it means to be the human animal. Who knows, we might find unexpected patterns or directions within the very pressures we are trying to avoid. Consider the surprising truth about the short-range subnuclear forces of intergalactic space, for instance. These are not detectable until they are crushed together by huge stellar pressures. And yet, says Karl Popper, these are the very forces that are responsible for holding together all the more complex atoms of the universe. When looked at differently, our external and internal pressures, like those massive stellar forces, could be both appropriate and necessary—a reminder that there would be no evolution of size, shape, or consciousness without them.

T
he environmental pressures of our time could be the very pressures behind a new evolutionary leap—not another expansion in brain size, but of a consciousness and an intelligence that can redefine our sense of history, our sense of Nature, and our sense of coexistence.

I believe the pressure is on and that it has to be taken personally. It is in the heated poetry of Antonio Machado: “
what have you done with the
garden?”
It is in the voice of the ecologically intelligent Rainer Maria Rilke:
“tonight, I want you to take a step out of your house.
” It is in the challenge of Rumi who asks:
“are you faithfully with us?”

To be ecologically intelligent will demand nothing less than the courage of Oedipus. It is to discover that Sophocles’ timeless myth is far less a story of incest than of our ultimate responsibility as human beings—to be accountable and conscious of our citizenship. Looking deeper into the myth is to discover that Oedipus, in addition to his self-imposed banishment from his kingdom for having unwittingly murdered his father and then having married his own mother, decreed that his own eyes be put out. A much-loved king, the people under his rule were horrified. “How were you to know?” they wept. His reply was, to the average mind, absurd. “I should have known,” he said. “I have no excuse.” Psychologically speaking, to blind oneself is to look inward. It is to develop what we most lack in our dealings with the outer world—insight. And so, as we face the environmental crises of our day, do we have it in us to say “We have no excuse?” Or will we turn our heads, pretending we just did not see?

T
o be ecologically intelligent is to be unafraid of stretching the measured horizons of rational thought. “Only those who risk going too far know how far they can go,” said poet T. S. Eliot, but that does not mean divorcing ourselves from the core of reason. It takes a certain willingness to go to that horizon and to look straight into the things that at first we don’t understand. But that is the demand of science, is it not? It is certainly the demand of the poets. True science is like true poetry. It suppresses nothing. It acknowledges that reason is a precious human asset, but it knows that our Cartesian reasoning cannot adequately explain the real experiences in our lives, the real human-animal stories, the synchronicities, or reasons why we come to the rescue of endangered species and of those who suffer.

Ecological intelligence is heretical, and yes, it is critical of what might be called the cult of rationality, but it does not reject it. It is an intelligence that recognizes that every creature exists within and beyond itself, that an animal is never just that—an animal. A human being is never just that, either. Every species in its own way is poetic, every individual a unique, interacting component in a complex field of life. And if there is anything absurd about this way of thinking, then it is time to risk that absurdity. It is time to take our souls to the horizon.

So far, I hope that the poetry in this book has taken us a little closer to that edge, or, as Seamus Heaney puts it, to a sensing of “something coming right, of something moving for us, a little ahead of us.” I hope that we have come a little further than we had expected.

And so, if promoting an ecological intelligence demands that we take a peep through an alternative telescope, then let’s do it. I hope you will discover that it has little to do with the existence of far-off moons and extraterrestrial life. Rather, it focuses on the here and now. It is about becoming more aware of the miracle of biology, of knowing that within and beneath the skin of our hands is a universe of unconscious life, and that every cell that makes up the you and the me has its own individual life. It is also about coming to know ourselves, warts and all, as 2-million-year-old creatures of soul, spirit, and Earth and of being prepared to be changed by that awareness.

SCIENCE AND SUBJECTIVITY

T
he first blind spot or resistance to the notion of an ecological intelligence is that it is subjective, anthropomorphic, and therefore unscientific. My response to such a perception is to quote from Robert Pirsig’s 1974 classic on science and subjectivity,
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance
: “If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant… then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.”

Anthropomorphic thinking—the tendency to ascribe human attributes to beings or things that are not human—is irresistible. As Jung noted, we need no elaborate proof to show that children think in this way…they animate their dolls and their toys, and with imaginative children it is easy to see that they inhabit a world of marvel and magic. To put oneself in the skin of the other is therefore not a passive phenomenon. It is an act that takes us beyond ourselves, toward the experience of a sense of relatedness and relationship with the other.

A stick, for example, is never just a stick. It is also a detachable extension of an arm, which can reach, probe, scratch, and protect. It can become a weapon. It can be thrown, taking the energy of the human deltoids, the biceps, and the fist with it. It is something to lean on, in which case it becomes an additional leg imbued with “muscles” and “ligaments” to support the human weight. It is as if the trajectory of the stick, the spear, and the arrow not only reflects the trajectory of human thought, but stimulates it. From sticks to space rockets, the anthropomorphic principle has been a major catalyst for the creative imagination of science.

A
nother sensitive but nevertheless classic example of anthropomorphic thinking is in the Genesis image of a Creator and the idea that human beings are made in the likeness of that image. Whether this image is right or wrong is beside the point. What matters is that we create these images, and we do it, it would seem, because our sense of meaning as a social and psychological species depends on it. Consciously or unconsciously, the tendency to connect, to make symbols, to invent analogies, and to see the world as an extension of our-selves has been of enormous significance for the development of the human mind. It is central to our notions of continuity and belonging.

Empirical science insists on objectivity—detaching one’s personal feelings and prejudices from the subject under observation. And yet quantum physics reminds us that the very act of observing the other, because it involves an exchange of influence, is intrinsically subjective. Any observation will arouse feelings. Subjectivity, the act of putting oneself in the skin of the other, is unavoidable. It is essential, not only to the methodology of tracking wild animals by the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, but also to the tracking of atomic particles.

In his book
The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science
, Louis Liebenberg suggests that anthropomorphic thinking may be the
result
of the creative scientific imagination. In other words, an imagination that observes, analyzes, interprets, and synthesizes preempts the capacity to understand and predict the thoughts and feelings of others. He adds that this kind of thinking arises from the need of the tracker to identify with the animal in order to predict its movements. The tracker must there-fore be able to visualize or internalize what it would be like to be that animal in its particular environment, suggesting a sense of observer-animal-environment continuity. Prediction of an animal’s movements would appear to be impossible unless one had learned how to ask the question: How would I respond if I was that animal in this environment and in these circumstances? In short, you would have to think like an eland, an elephant, or a fish. You have to put yourself into their skin.

Liebenberg continues: “In the process of identification with the animal, the tracker superimposes his or her way of thinking onto that of the animal, thereby creating a model of animal behavior in which the animal is understood to have certain human characteristics.” To do this, the tracker would not only have to be highly familiar with the ways of the particular animal he was tracking, but, in all likelihood, would adopt some of the characteristics of the animal as well.

In an outstanding documentary on the Kalahari bushmen hunters by Craig and Damon Foster entitled
The Great Dance
, one of the hunters describes the process of putting oneself in the skin of the other:

I, !Nqate, live in the Kalahari. I know all the water-holes and pans around here, the places where the animals come. When you track an animal, you must become the animal. You feel a tingling in your armpits when the animal is close. These are the things we know. When tracking is like dancing…this is the Great Dance…you are talking with God when you are doing these things.

From the Kalahari Desert to the laboratory of the nuclear physicist, says Liebenberg, it is well known and expected that the hunter’s/ experimenter’s preconceived image of the process under investigation will determine the outcome of the hunt/observations. When the scientist has such a clear visual image, wrote L. E. Walkup, the nature of the seeing or the sensing is described as though the scientist felt like the object being visualized. In thinking about a phenomenon they are interested in, some physicists, even in highly abstract theoretical physics, may more or less identify themselves with a nuclear particle and may even ask: What would I do if I were that particle? According to physicist M. Deutsch, writing in 1959, these preconceived images are symbolic anthropomorphic representations of a basically intuitive or, for some, an inconceivable atomic process. They are also a reflection of the boldness of the imagination of the scientist.

Putting this into practice, try sitting at a water hole in the wild for a while, watching a herd of antelope coming down to drink. It takes ages. The animals move a few steps and then stop. Some of them look around, nostrils flared, ears pricked. They move forward again and then suddenly they freeze. As if by command, they all look beyond the water hole. Your eyes follow and there, exactly where they are looking, is a solitary lion dozing in the mottled shade of an acacia. You catch your breath. A flock of doves take off from the near edge of the water precipitating a startled retreat. The tension belongs to you. But the antelope are thirsty, and the process starts all over again. It is hot. Thirst begins to outweigh the threat of danger. You reach for your water bottle. The lion lifts its head and then flops back into a one-eyed sleep. The antelope bristle with tension and a muscle in your shoulder begins to ache. You want them to drink, and yet your muscles are filled with the same antelope uncertainty. You are in their skin. Their thirst and their vigilance belongs to you. For a while you have become the animal that you have been watching.

As you stay with the situation—the antelope, the lion, the doves, the water hole, the heat of the day, and the land, the more coherent the relationship between you and the activities of everything going on around you becomes. The longer you stay with it, the clearer it becomes that you are linked, and, as writer David Abram puts it, you stand “face to face with another intelligence, another center of experience.”

S
ometimes to really be with the other we have to put the book away…we have to keep our necks still…we have to shut our eyes. Try entering into the flow of Rilke’s ink as he writes this poem for the gazelle,
Gazella dorcas
.