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Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth
That is, at root, the power and beauty of what it means to be a natural scientist. It is a way of thinking that is also a way of perceiving that is also a way of understanding; it gives us access to the underlying nature of the world. It is very different from current scientific approaches, and a great deal older.
We literally think our way to the truths that reside, and can only be found, in the metaphysical background of the world, truths that underpin our daily world and that lead to a whole life. We find in this kind of thinking a way to understand the life we live embedded within.
When we enter the image, we find what Henri Corbin called the imaginal world, that is, the deeper metaphysical backgound of the world, through using a particular kind of imagination. As Corbin noted (in his particularly difficult languaging) . . . It is the cognitive function of the Imagination that permits the establishment of a rigorous analogical knowledge, escaping the dilemma of current rationalism.28
This is how the imaginal realm is accessed. And that imaginal realm is where the mythic, the world of the Forms that Plato spoke of, and the human can meet—the only place they can meet.
For most ancient cultures, this kind of imagining occurs not through or in the brain but through and in the heart.
As Keller comments, “Central to neo-Darwinism theory was the premise that whatever genetic variation does occur is random, and McClintock reported genetic changes that are under the control of the organism. Such results just did not fit in the standard frame of analysis.”35
Subatomic particles exist in a quantum state of potential. When they are measured—i.e., observed—that potential collapses; the particle takes on a specific form and that form subsequently shapes both space and behavior.
DNA is a flexible organ of the cell that exists in a state of dynamic change; it is in fact nonlinear, as all organs are.
In other words, in the quantum world the subatomic particles exist in forms that both turn on and turn off genes at the same time.
all organisms contain what has, from classical perspectives, been considered “junk” DNA, that is, sequences that don’t seem to do anything. And there are a lot of them. These apparently irrelevant DNA sequences are highly mutable and responsive to quantum alterations. The genes in these “junk” sequences, in the quantum world, exist in multiple states of potential continuously.
Those “junk” genes that are existing simultaneously in the quantum multiverse hold within them all potential forms the organism can take in any of the millions upon millions of possible exterior environmental states.
measurement of a quantum system draws out from the quantum superposition of all possible states a single reality for the physical world.39
In essence, it is the organism’s own cells that drive evolution. They respond to environmental cues (pressures) and collapse potential DNA states so that the organism better fits the environment. As McFadden reveals . . . In this way, even lowly E. coli cells may have a certain control of their destiny; a control denied to inanimate objects. This is what makes living organisms special. They are able to use quantum measurement to perform directed actions and one of those actions is quantum evolution.
Cells act as their own quantum-measuring devices; mutations are not in fact “random” at all. A bacteria, placed in a solution in which it cannot survive, that has no fuel source for it to feed on (such as the cleaning solutions in hospitals), will, in fact, genetically alter itself so that its offspring can survive in that environment.
DNA restructures itself, form alters its nature, and adaptive mutation occurs.
“The instructions for gene rearrangement come not only from the organism but from the environment in which it lives.”
McClintock was beginning to understand with her insight about the source of gene rearrangement that living organisms are essentially nonlinear, self-organized systems,
To understand what that is, go into your yard or take a walk in a park and let yourself wander, just looking at this and that, until something catches your attention—a large tree perhaps. Then stop and let yourself really look at it and, when you are really immersed in seeing it, ask yourself, How does it feel? In that tiny moment of time a unique feeling tone will emerge into your awareness, just as it did before. But, if you pay close attention, you will notice that there is a difference. There is a livingness to it, which the pen or cup or desk did not have (or perhaps did not have as
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To make the experience even more distinct it helps to immediately compare the plant you have just felt with something else, so, after the tree, find something else that captures your attention, perhaps a blade of grass or a small flowering plant or even a stone. Focus on it and ask yourself, How does it feel? Again, an intimation of mood or feeling will emerge, one that is different from the tree. Yet, it, too, will possess that livingness, that unique difference, however slight it is, in feeling from the manmade things you perceived earlier.
Something new enters our experience when we reach out with that nonphysical part of us and touch the wildness of the world.
When you travel further along the road of feeling, going from “How does this conversation feel?” to “How does this table feel?” to “How does this river feel?” you begin to find that there is much more to the world than we have been taught. You begin to notice that a complexity of perceptual feeling arises from touching the wildness of the world
what you are touching now has its own aliveness, its own awareness, its own capacity to communicate.
What occurs, sooner or later, is that one day, when you reach out with your sensing and touch some living part of the world, suddenly there is some sort of response. Sooner or later, often when you least expect it, something will touch you in return. And though it’s usually subtle, it doesn’t have to be .
We discover then that trees have been doing something more for the past 300 million years than simply pining away for our emergence.
We experience in that moment what the ancient Greeks—the Athenians—called aisthesis, the touch of a nonhuman soul upon the deeps of us—and know that ours touches them in turn. We are not here for ourselves alone
And when that happens, we abandon the view of life that does not allow us to extend interiority to dolphins or trees or stones. And so break the great injunction of reductionist science Being unable to extend interiority and consciousness outward, as Robert Bly once said, keeps human beings isolated in their own house and, in extreme cases, we simply look out at a world with which we have no possibility of contact.
We are cut off from the metaphysical background of the world and our perceptual capacities are kept in a box.
If you fully combine the experience of aisthesis with analogical thinking so that it blends into a unique synaesthesia of perceptual cognition and feeling, the human world can sometimes be left behind entirely. There is no longer me, over here, touching a nonhuman intelligence over there. There is me, inside the world in which the nonhuman
The boundary between self and other disappears and you begin to see the world through their eyes.
Still . . . it is possible to go even deeper yet. It is possible to move inside the scenario itself, the place from which all life-forms emerged. It is the place where background becomes foreground, the place where environment is the intelligence encountered, the place where communication of a very different sort begins.
The Imaginal Realm
We begin to experience then, at the deepest possible level, that we are immersed in a fluid medium, a living textual field—Fuller’s scenario—throughout which are scattered the condensed meanings—Bateson’s transforms of messages,
We suddenly get a sense of the field itself as foreground, of everything on which we have previously been focused as only condensed expressions of the field. We find suddenly, in our experience, that there is only the field and that the field is alive—is in fact the only life-form.
Each time we begin by feeling into the depths, encountering golden threads, and following them where they lead us . . . for only the thread knows where it is going and that will always be true
But suddenly . . . for some reason we will never understand with our rational minds, one day, something different happens. While we are still deep in our dreaming, totally immersed in what has captured our attention, our focus shifts. We suddenly look up and perceive the textual field itself.
Background in that moment becomes foreground.
As Henry Corbin puts it, “One sets out; at a given moment, there is a break with the geographical coordinates that can be located on our maps. But the ‘traveler’ is not conscious of the precise moment; he does not realize it,” does not notice it happening, he just suddenly finds himself arrived.6
Corbin remarked that the Persian mystics said that there was a world Aristotle didn’t know of, one where the mythic and the mundane interpenetrated each other. They called it the imaginal world, or as Corbin put it: the Mundus Imaginalis. And here it has a deeper meaning, it means the world imagination, the place where the world dreams form into being
This the place that lies underneath the world of form,
The textual field’s form in classical space reveals the moment-to-moment shape that Earth takes in order to maintain self-organization. Gaia generates that ever-changing form continually out of an underlying field of potential—out of the mythic world, the quantum multiverse. Plato called this the realm of the Forms . . . or, as other ancient Greeks might have called it, it is the realm of the Archi, the place from which all form comes. When you suddenly look up and find yourself immersed in the textual field itself, you enter the place where the mythic and the mundane meet. The place the
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Archi means the first. They are the primary or first things from which all phemonena come—they are the potentials that reside in the quantum multiverse.
The archetypes, which reside in the imaginal world, prefigure the forms they become in our world. As those archetypes express themselves into classical Newtonian space, they change. They are modified by where and how they appear.
Every form we see in this world is a modified expression of the archetype that underlies it.
The archetype of plant, however, is to be found in the imaginal world, the place from which Earth dreams form into being.
Every plant we see is an expression of the underlying archetype whose present form has been altered by the part of the scenario into which it has emerged. The form a plant takes comes from the demands that environment has made on it and those demands are, that shape is, encoded within its seed as heredity. There is only one plant form, Goethe said, and it’s the archetype, or as he called it, the Urpflanze, which resides in the imaginal world.
It was from his ability to see underlying archetype that Luther Burbank could perceive plants the way he did. He knew, in his experience, that all plant forms began as one central form long ago. He knew that the history of each plant was a history of the demands that environment had made on it over long evolutionary time.
When we find our way into the imaginal world, we enter the place where we can perceive the archetypes before they are expressed into form. We enter a distinct and real place, and somewhere deep inside us, we recognize it. It
Specific archetypes are generated into form in a particular place and time necessary to keep homeodynamis intact, to maintain the self-organized field. That is why Lewontin described the objects we tend to look at as foreground as being only concentrated fields that themselves show the shape of environmental space. Form is expressed only to fulfill ecological purpose. Forms are a self-organizational homeodynamis necessity. And these forms . . . they are pulled out of quantum potential by the needs of the environment itself. We are, all of us, dreamed into being by the needs of this place.
We dream because the Earth dreams. We sing and know music because the vibrational expression we call music is inherent in this place. We have the capacity to create because the larger system from which we come has at its core the capacity to create. We express new form through dreaming because that is how all form is created in this place. As the poet Dale Pendell once wrote . . . As dreams are the healing songs from the wilderness of our unconscious— So wild animals, wild plants, wild landscapes are the healing dreams from the deep singing mind of the Earth.
We are, all of us, dreamed into being.
