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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth
The musical world is one of the only places that the feeling sense is still strong. Nearly all musicians understand that the song’s got to have feeling to it to be genuine.
The feeling dimension of the world is not easily describable in words, but it’s deeply important—especially if you want to touch the dreaming of Earth. Unfortunately, in the West, the feeling sense is not only atrophied, very few people even know that it is a primary sensory modality.
The truth is: Every physical object you see has a distinctly different feeling aspect than every other object you will encounter. The object’s visual inputs, auditory inputs, olfactory inputs . . . all have unique feeling dimensions to them.
The developed use of this feeling dimension of things—the secret kinesis of physical objects—that is the key to opening sensory gating channels more widely. It’s one of the innate mechanisms of hallucinogens, neurognostics of any sort. They
Reclaiming the feeling sense, and developing it as a primary sensing tool, is one of the main ways to begin to enter more deeply into the metaphysical background of the world.
We travel through a sea of meaning every day of our lives, but we rarely pay attention to its touch upon us. We rarely see the reality underneath surfaces, often because we don’t want to either see or feel what is really there.
So, again, the first step is opening the feeling sense, the second is noticing how you respond to each particular touch, the third is working to understand the meaning of the thing you have encountered, to determine its nature, the “why” of it.
By enhancing your feeling sense and using it continually to build a library of feeling experiences you learn how to read the world around you as you would a book of words you learn how to move through, to live in, the metaphysical background of the world as a way of life Eventually, as Twain puts it, he “had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper.” This constant focus on the craft, Twain says, resulted in a tremendous store of knowledge about the river, so deeply ingrained inside him, that he came to know the river as well, or better, than he
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We who travel this path must learn to let the other life-forms of the Earth speak to us on their own terms.
Only if we can learn how to step out of our human orientation and see from the Earth’s point of view can we do anything functional about the predicament facing our species. Once we step out we can begin to see the connections between things, the invisible lines that bind them together. Only then can we truly understand that the hawk is in reality a part of the mountain and the mountain a part of the hawk, both equally crucial expressions of what we have taken to be background.
Feeling the world brings the natural synaesthetic experience of the world back into conscious experience. You literally begin to smell the tiredness or strength of the car as well as feel it.
For deeper reasons that any of us can ever know, of all the connections that run through the world, there are certain ones that touch us more strongly, that call us, that become golden threads that generate in us what James Hillman called notitia, the attentive noticing of the soul. And from that noticing, as Hillman describes it, comes “the capacity to form true notions of things.” The connections that touch us in this way are special. They are the ones meant for us for reasons only the Earth will ever know.
Stafford spent his life, attentive to his feeling sensing of the world around him, being open always to the touch of golden threads. He said that it was essential to understand that: When you find you do have a response—trust it. It has a meaning.
When something captures your attention in this way, trust it. Follow it home to where it lives, deep inside the world.
Golden threads touch all of us, every day, but most often only artists and children take the time to follow them.
As Einstein once put it, “The pursuit of beauty and truth is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.” The initial touch of a golden thread is always attended by a specific kind of feeling.
Great art occurs when the lines and the golden thread become identical in feeling.
When you, as reader, later read those written lines you literally experience the golden thread as if it were your own.
The thread takes us to whatever things it is intertwined with, connected to. And they are always things that appear to be unrelated to the thread we are following.
Stafford continues, “only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”9
True writers (musicians, scientists, all artists) follow; they are servants of the process, not its masters. They follow the thread where it leads and write down what they find on the journey. They are, in a sense, transcribers,
We find, always, when we follow golden threads, the metaphysical background of the world.
Golden threads are an experience of the extensive interconnections that touch the nodes that we know as physical objects, what Gregory Bateson called “a vast network or matrix of interlocking message material.”
Golden threads touch us because something deep inside us needs what is on the other end of that thread. It can be the need for words, for poetry. It can be the need for medicine
Following a golden thread, irrespective of the craft we practice, starts with noticing something that touches us and captures our attention.
The composer Jimmy Webb is touching on this when he says that in this process, “we learn that chords are living things.”
And in the process I find, as I always do, that, as Mozart said, “The spaces between notes is music, too.”
The music begins to emerge of its own accord from the place music lives when no one is playing it. And slowly it emerges into this world, saying what it uniquely is meant to say, I only the medium through which it expresses itself. My job one of following, not imposing.
Thus, when lyrics and song are combined in just the right way, the song feels as if it is one organic whole . . . because it is.
The lyrics were already inherent in the song . . . they were just allowed to come into a linguistic form (and vice versa).
Human language is a fusion of the kind of communication birds, whales, and dolphins use with a more utilitarian type of communication used by, for instance, chimpanzees. As Robert Berwick, a professor of linguistics at MIT puts it . . . What got joined together was the ability to construct these complex patterns, like a song, but with words. . . . All human languages have a finite number of stress patterns, a certain number of beat patterns. Well, in birdsong, there is also this limited number of beat patterns. 26
Birds, dolphins, and whales use a more holistic communicatory language, filled with meaning as a gestalt rather than a linear cause and effect process. Each melody they create is a single unit of communication holding within it the essential meaning as an experiential gestalt.
Depth Immersion
The secret to the following of golden threads is immersion in the thread through the use of the feeling sense, an immersion so deep that you forget everything else but the touch of that thread and the effort to bring it into form in the world. Everything else disappears.
Every one of us can do this, can immerse ourselves deep inside the golden threads that touch us; it is the secret to finding the heart of a thing, to finding the connections between things, to journeying deep into Earth, into the metaphysical background behind and inside everything.
Artists go deep but natural scientists go very deep. When the world itself is the focus, something new enters the process, something very much alive and intelligent and aware in its own right.
To get to the truth, to see the world as it really is, there is a “necessary next step,” as Evelyn Keller puts it. And that next step? “The reincorporation of the naturalist’s approach—an approach that does not press nature with leading questions but dwells patiently in the variety and complexity of organisms.”32
McClintock had been considered one of the greatest genetic researchers in the world. She comments that “it was just a surprise that I couldn’t communicate; it was a surprise that I was being ridiculed, or being told that I was really mad. . .
George Washington Carver is one of them. “Anything will give up its secrets,” he once said, “if you love it enough.” As Keller put it, “A deep reverence for nature, a capacity for union with that which is to be known—these reflect a different image of science from that of a purely rational enterprise.”13
Robert Bly says that something surprising happens often during the writing. It is as if the object itself, a stump or an orange, has links with the human psyche, and the unconscious provides material it would not give if asked directly. The unconscious passes into the object and returns. 19
as Goethe put it . . . Every new object, clearly seen opens up a new organ of perception in us.
What happens is that the meaning within the sensory impulses has been grasped. The part of the brain that deals with meaning has received the sensory impulses from the visual cortex and successfully analyzed and integrated the relationship of the visual elements to the whole and to each other. The thing that is more than the sum of the parts, the organized pattern that is there, suddenly bursts into awareness. The meaning is finally perceived and the image that is inside the sensory frame suddenly appears.
The meaning is finally perceived and the image that is inside the sensory frame suddenly appears. Click. Like flipping a light switch.
We live in, are immersed within, a world of meanings not objects. But because the condensation of meaning occurs almost immediately when we see a physical object, none of us notice the process happening. It’s so automatic we miss ourselves doing it. this is due in part to the habituation of gating channels
But it has not always been so automatic; when we were babies it wasn’t automatic at all. We experienced the same kind of sensory impulses then that we do now but we didn’t understand the meanings in them. We learned how to understand the inherent meanings over time—and we learned it at the simplest level possible; we learned to stop at chair or tree and then go on with our lives. But the thing is, chair is only part of the complex of meanings that are embedded within the visual images we are receiving, and the most superficial one at that.
If the chair is approached through our feeling sense, if we begin to develop our natural capacity for perceiving the secret kinesis of things, rather than leave it undeveloped in the unconscious, then those other meanings begin to emerge into our awareness through our practiced, synaesthetic perceiving. The invisible elements of the thing, its deeper nature and meanings, including its connections to other, apparently unrelated phenomena, become sensible to our synaesthetic perceiving.
And as we think through our sensing, feel more deeply into the image itself, a similar pattern recognition experience occurs deep inside the self. Something new just pops into our awareness, like a light switch being flipped. And once that happens we begin to see what was right in front of us all along.
Analogical thinking is the kind of cognition that occurs when you think through your synaesthetic perceiving, headed toward a goal (this is crucial), in this instance, feeling into and attempting to understand some part of the living world that has captured your attention.
When there is submersion to the point where all sense of self fades you are in analogical thinking. Automatically.
The different kind of thinking that this book is about entails learning to think analogically. It is the only way that the deeper text of the world can be read.
