The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

by Sy Montgomery

In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

Earlier in the day, I had seen a fish’s dreams—and now, perhaps, an octopus had tasted my pain. In this watery realm, I was being drawn to possibilities I had never before imagined.

At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus’s liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible.

Expanding the mind beyond the self allows us to relieve our loneliness, to connect to what Jung called universal consciousness, the original, inherited shapes shared with all minds; unites us with what Plato called the animus mundi, the all-extensive world soul shared by all of life.

In my scuba-induced altered state, I’m not in the grip of a drug: I am lucid in my immersion, voluntarily becoming part of what feels like the ocean’s own dream.

Like humans, the cephs he met were intelligent and aware. “But look at all those neurons in the arms!” he said. “They may have a radically different style of psychological organization from us. Perhaps in octopus we see intelligence without a centralized self. If you have the design of an octopus,” Peter asked, “is there a sense of self at all, a center of experience? If not, that involves imagining something so different from us it might be impossible to think of.”

“Volition is karma,” the Buddha is reported to have said. Karma, in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, is conscious action. Karma is not fate, but, in fact, its opposite: Karma is choice.