The Feedback Loop of Earth and Soul

The Feedback Loop of Earth and Soul

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. I’m 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.

We arise embedded in mind, with mind in every direction. Human beings in the dominant culture seem to miss the mindedness all around them.

The “modern” human walks around with “ideas” “in” their head. This localization of mind remains untenable on scientific grounds, and does not fit with most of the spiritual/philosophical traditions we have inherited.

Nature is already Minded. Because of this, we need to mind Nature—that is, attend to Nature, and also allow Nature’s mindedness to spontaneously presence itself in/through/as us and our World.

We likewise need to allow Nature to mind us. That will mean liberating ourselves into the nonduality of Nature and Culture—liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind. We can’t really let Nature care for us, guide us, teach us, and even liberate us if we maintain a false duality between Nature and culture.

And one of the problems with human thought, speech, and action is that we have practiced them in ways that exclude the mindedness of Nature and all her beings, and so we have become unable to properly participate in and enjoy the fullest benefits of the larger ecologies of mind that constitutes our world. That larger ecology of mind can help us solve problems and heal our lives together.

For instance, we already know that the vast majority of our medicines ultimately derive from the mindedness of Nature. Scientifically speaking, evolution is a mental process, and by means of evolution, Nature has thought up antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, analgesics, antidepressants, and so much more.

But we in the dominant culture, generally speaking, don’t yet properly engage with the mindedness of Nature, and so we miss all the things Nature has to teach us. As I often say, when Frans de Waals asks his excellent question, “Are we intelligent enough to understand how intelligent non-human beings are?” we must answer, “No.” And that answer applies beyond other “animals”. It applies to the intelligence and mindedness pervasive in Nature.

If this answer persists, it may bring about the collapse of organized human life as we know it. Therefore, we must get beyond this ignorance—and only from beyond it can we say what our real potential is for creative intelligence, for wisdom, love, and beauty, for truly skillful thought, speech, and action.

We can here quote Gregory Bateson’s excellent crystallization of the predicament of contemporary civilization. As he put it: The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way human beings think.

Not all human beings, of course. We’re talking about the ways conquest consciousness operates.

That’s a key thing to discern. Our problem in general is human ignorance—not liberalism, not conservativism, not capitalism, not socialism.

When an ignorant mind does anything at all, this leads to negative consequences.

This thought properly frames the essential challenge facing most any group or individual in terms of realizing breakthroughs into genuinely creative and skillful patterns of action.

We have gotten saddled with insane notions of “innovation” and “progress”. In our culture, “innovation” and “progress” mean more of the same. We just keep elaborating the same pattern, and the world we depend on keeps getting degraded in the process. “Innovation” and “progress” mean more junk, more waste, more distraction, more little hits of dopamine to keep us going along with the process of making a small number of people wealthy while the world itself becomes depleted.

If we want to go beyond mere “innovation” or what is called “thinking outside the box,” and enter a new age, a new paradigm, something truly incredible (and incredibly needed), this will only come when we have attuned our thinking to the most creative thinking possible—

that is to say, the thinking that created butterflies and lotus blossoms, the thinking that created the rainforest and the still-maturing species that must learn to live in harmony with the rainforest.

We must attune ourselves to the creative intelligence of nature.

Bateson, a rigorous scientist, specifically valued the arts as a way to help us learn to think the way nature thinks, and thus unleash our fullest potential while healing the damage wrought by our ignorance.

Another way of putting it: We need to transcend so-called “thinking outside the box” and instead practice thinking outside.

That “outside” means thinking outside the skull, and thinking outside the built environment.

Thinking is less “in” us than we are in it.

This does not reduce to so-called “metaphysical idealism” or some other “ism”. Nor should we latch onto it in a dualistic way, as if the suggestion that “mind” or the “mindedness” of nature somehow stands in contrast with “body”.

From our current viewpoint, both “mind” and “body” remain conceptual abstractions. To liberate mind and body requires liberating all the minds and bodies of our world, and allowing those minds and bodies to liberate each of us.

As for time in Nature bringing us more into thinking, into a more healthy mind, the cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer realized that some of his best ideas came after backpacking trips into Nature of 3 days or more. In an interview he said,

Having hiked around the desert for years, I noticed in myself, and from talking to others, that people think differently after being out in the desert. Their thoughts are clearer, they’re certainly more relaxed, they report being more creative. If you can disconnect and experience being in the moment for two or three days, it seems to produce a difference in qualitative thinking.

We could recall here Pierre Hadot’s recognition of the rupture which Sophia—goddess of wisdom—demands from us, the rupture every genuinely spiritual or philosophical life demands from us.

Entering a path of philosophy or LoveWisdom means a rupture with countless habits of daily life, a rupture with the limited and limiting ways of life for which LoveWisdom offers therapeia, therapy for our souls.

We need to see how that rupture with habitual life can become accomplished as reunion with Nature. In other words, we face the possibility that “civilized” life as we know it stands in a tension with Nature, and that this “civilized” life goes altogether with a measurably degraded thinking—and perhaps also a thinking degraded in ways we currently cannot measure.

Of course, one needs to validate these sorts of anecdotal findings and suggestions—the best way being through practice-realization in, through, and as consummatory experience. But current science has its own ways of working with experience, and they are not all bad.

Strayer and his co-investigators set up an experiment, the results of which they published under the delightful title, “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings.”

Anyway, the researchers found something relatively astonishing:

Atchley, Strayer, and Atchley: 2012

As we noted, the authors titled this research paper, “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings.” If we really pause and let these findings sink in, we might suggest they gave it the wrong title. They might better have called it “The Creativity OF the Wild,” and maybe subtitled it, “Returning Intelligence to Its Proper Place.”

contemplation. Leong et al. (: 2014

It’s interesting that connectedness to nature may somehow relate to our being more innovative and holistic thinkers. That and the fact that these researchers refer to this as a style of consciousness seems significant. We can miss the ways consciousness has a developmental aspect. Consciousness always seems like . . . consciousness—as if consciousness simply reveals things as they are.

But how consciousness reveals things depends on its development. Development significantly confined to a built environment, and further confined by unskillful and unrealistic philosophies of life, yields a significantly limited consciousness. But we can’t see this easily because, to emphasize the point, consciousness reveals things as if that’s simply how they are; it doesn’t indicate that it only reveals things as we have constructed them.

We find this basic fact supported not only in the above findings, but in countless other empirical findings of both the wisdom traditions and the science of the dominance culture.

g comes from Zelenski et al. (: 2015

meta-analysis including over: 2400

On the other hand, the style of consciousness arising from rootedness in nature seems more innovative, more holistic, more cooperative, more sustainable, more present and aware.

Other researchers have looked into things like “forest therapy,” “nature therapy,” and other interventions that support or replicate the findings of David Strayer and his colleagues. All of these lines of research can fall into the trap of keeping the findings and suggestions tame or even co-opting them into our pattern of insanity.

For instance, so-called “forest therapy” may encourage us to take up “forest bathing,” which some authors suggest we can accomplish even in city parks or short walks in relatively tame wooded areas. In an absolute sense, this is true. But the spirit of this sort of therapeutic intervention is not the same as the therapeia of philosophy, which would demand that we see a deeper problem than the need to occasionally “get away from it all,” and would encourage the more significant rupture that “forest bathing” might actually forestall (“forest bathing” can end up by functionally turning forests into our psychic bathtub, severely limiting the mutual empowerment of forests and humans in untold ways).

“Therapy” treats symptoms, while therapeia calls for rebirth, rejuvenation, a reorientation, a reorganization of experience. If extended exposure to Nature gives such startling gains in intelligence, along with other benefits, we have to pause and reflect on the whole organization of society, not try to take better advantage of its current forms of organization by seeking out nearby parks. What ongoing clarity and coherence, what ongoing intelligence does our current context cut us off from?

If this were a new finding, we might hesitate. But, if nothing else, we can recall that retreat into closer communion with Nature sparked Thoreau’s accusation that, “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but no philosophers.” Such a finding runs through many philosophical and spiritual traditions, even in the dominant culture.

In a similarly Nature-inspired vein, Emerson wrote, in “Nature,”:

In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed in the blithe air and lifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes.

Here Emerson properly associates Nature with whatever good thing we would want from what we call “reason” and what we call “faith” or even “emotion”.

These are problematic terms, and “reason” has almost become a disease. But we do want the positive benefits from the delusion we called “reason”. We find these in our own rootedness, rootedness in the sacred, which we well practice and realize (which we discover-create) in forests, mountains, oceans, deserts, and all sentient beings—all of sentient being.

And both Emerson and dominant culture science get at the essence of what we seek: Transcendence of the ego. This is what we wanted from “reason,” but the dominant culture got lost, perhaps in the fallacy of intellectualism, and the dualities of path-goal, organism-environment, and so on.

Why would Emerson speak of a return to reason and faith? Because of the way a proper attunement with Nature accomplishes a single gesture of rupture and reunion. We can think about this in evolutionary terms. As the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht notes:

We used to get positive psychoterratic feedback between the Earth and ourselves as a natural part of being alive and human. But now if you go to the beach or try to breathe in the clean air in Oregon, you’re going to have plastic, rubbish, and smoke from wildfires all around you. It alienates us from our natural connections in a world that is polluted.

We cannot know, from inside our current epistemology, how we could know in a nurturing psychoterratic feedback loop, a loop that unifies Mind and Nature in ways that activate our creative intelligence and fuller capacities in ways we currently access in degraded fashion or not at all. It seems that people hunger for this feedback loop, and for the kind of Mind that emerges in a context more rooted in Nature.

For instance, speaking in: 1870

We can consider the more recent example of Miriam Lancewood, a woman who spent seven years living in the wild in New Zealand—by which I mean a woman who lived with her partner in a light, moveable shelter, who hunted and gathered her food, who had to make a campfire for heat, who had no cellphone or internet, and so on.

She did occasionally hike to the nearest road and then hitchhike into town where she played guitar on the street, using the money to get a few fruits and vegetables when such things were hard to come by. But other than that, she and her partner lived off the land. Miriam originally lived in Holland, and she was a school teacher by profession. She met a man who shared her passion for leaving civilization and living in the wild, and off they went.

As part of an interview she did for New Zealand television, she read from a letter to her sister: “Dearest Sophie, Can you image a way of life so quiet, so timeless, so abundant and full that watching a single leaf fluttering from a tree, lifted into the air by a little breeze, turning silver in the sunshine, is meaningful?”

When the interviewer asked Miriam, “What do you think of the way we live our lives?” She replied,

I don’t really know how you can stand it. How can you deal with sleep deprivation . . . you have all these things, and so much pressure, and how do you deal with that without becoming so dull? How can you keep clarity? How can you keep vital? How do you deal with a monotone existence . . . running around the clock, how do you deal with it?

Again, the issue of clarity of mind should stand out for anyone interested in how we know. A simple internet search will turn up the literature on state-dependent learning, and that has some bearing on our inquiry. But we’re talking about something bigger, a way of life, a style of consciousness, a developmental trajectory of Nature and Culture.

It’s interesting to hear such words from a seemingly ordinary person who was born and raised in an urban environment. I don’t think most of us in the dominant culture can really understand this, since we haven’t spent much time in truly wild places, living in such intimacy with the land.

Jung suggested that we might get in touch with this psychoterratic feedback loop by making some beginning, some kind of working our way back to Nature, even as modest as gardening. His comments evoke a larger context as well.

We should bracket his comments with the awareness that “tilling the earth” is arguably part of conquest consciousness, that the notion of “owning” land is almost certainly so.

Let’s read this as an imperative to be truly connected with the land, and that Jung only uses this phrase given the context of the dominant culture. Let’s also accept that in general his suggestions might be overly optimistic, since we may need more of a change in our relationship to the land and each other than the dominant culture can handle without becoming something quite different from what it is.

Finally, let’s savor the deliciousness of a psychologist diagnosing the effect of capitalism on the soul. Jung was no communist, but he certainly registered the ill effects of capitalism on our psyche.

Here’s the passage:

Every [person] should have [their] own plot of land so that the instincts can come to life again. To own land is important psychologically, and there is no substitute for it. We keep forgetting that we are primates and that we have to make allowances for these primitive layers in our psyche. The farmer is still closer to these layers. In tilling the earth he moves around within a very narrow radius, but he moves on his own land. The industrial worker is a pathetic, rootless being, and his remuneration in money is not tangible but abstract. In earlier times, when the crafts flourished, he derived satisfaction from seeing the fruit of his labor. He found adequate self-expression in such work.

But this is no longer the case. First of all, he is responsible for only a small part of the finished product. Secondly, the product is sold, it disappears, and he has no further stake in it. Because the psychological reward is inadequate, the worker rebels against his employer and against “capitalism” as a whole. We all need nourishment for our psyche. It is impossible to find such nourishment in urban tenements without a patch of green or a blossoming tree. We need a relationship with nature . . . I derive a great deal of pleasure from growing my own potatoes. People tend to look for the Kingdom of God in the outer world rather than in their own souls . . . Individuation is not only an upward but also a downward process. Without any body, there is no mind and therefore no individuation. Our civilizing potential has led us down the wrong path. All too often an American worker who owns only one car considers himself a poor devil, because his boss has two or three cars. This is symptomatic of pointless striving for material possessions.

Yet, we need to project ourselves into the things around us. My self is not confined to my body. It extends into all the things I have made and all the things around me. Without these things, I would not be myself; I would not be a human being . . . Everything surrounding me is part of me, and that is precisely why a rented apartment is disastrous . . .

A community is based on personal relationships. No community can evolve where people can easily move households from one place to another. The one-family house, the house owned by its inhabitants, is much better because it necessarily engenders a sense of permanence.

. . . . When capitalism takes everything out of the hands of the worker, he feels he has been robbed. Therefore our economic system must put something else within his grasp. In particular, the worker must be enabled to have a personal leisure-time occupation, and this again is best suited to the private dwelling, the family, the garden. . .

Life in a small city is better than life in a large one, politically, socially, and in terms of community relations. Big cities are responsible for our uprootedness. The Swiss are mentally more balanced and not so neurotic as many peoples. We are fortunate to live in a great number of small cities. If I do not have what my psyche needs, I become dangerous.

. . . A captive animal cannot return to freedom. But our workers can return. We see them doing it in the allotment gardens in and around our cities; these gardens are an expression of love for nature and for one’s own plot of land. As our working hours become shorter, the question of leisure time becomes increasingly essential to us, time in which we are free of commands and restraints and in which we can achieve self-realization. I am fully committed to the idea that human existence should be rooted in the earth. (JS: 202-4)

Perhaps the most important suggestion occurs at the end: Our existence is rooted in Earth.

And we should note well that Jung, like countless other intellectuals, expected working hours to get shorter. They haven’t, and we should wonder how much that has to do with the fact that many of us might have used the extra time to root ourselves more in Nature.

Although Jung offers us many other helpful suggestions here, it’s good to see how many of his suggestions might emerge as symptoms of conquest consciousness. Why should we think we must till the Earth? Why should that not seem foolish? Because we got used to it? The no-till revolution in agriculture may do much good, as may the general movements of permaculture and rewilding.

The indigenous peoples of Turtle Island seem to have found the white man’s predilection for tilling the soil an aberration. One of the more extreme responses comes from Smohalla, of the Wanapam Nation:

o be born again. (from Philip: 1997

Indigenous peoples are not against agriculture per se, but they do invite us to see how invasive agriculture goes altogether with a certain mindset, a certain developmental pathway of consciousness.

Conquest consciousness gives rise to conquest agriculture, and to conquest culture in general. And a principle attribute of conquest culture is its disconnection from spiritual and ecological realities.

We have tried to open up to the ways in which mind itself is ecological. We think of ecology as a study of some aspect of Nature. But we ourselves are Nature, and so is our mind.

Mind is not something that appears in ecologies. Rather mind is ecological, and evolution itself is a mental process, not a physical process that accidentally created minds that float around in an otherwise dead and stupid Earth.

In relation to all of this, it may help us to consider the words of an actual farmer. But we’ve done a lot of good thinking so far, and it’s probably best if we take a break.

In part two, we’ll consider the wise and wonderful words of the poet-farmer Wendall Berry. I think you’ll enjoy his beautiful reflections, and the ways they illuminate and elaborate what we have considered so far.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the magical and sacred interwovenness of soul and soil, of cosmos and psyche, 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.