What if there is, yes, a quality of inwardness to the mind, not because the mind is located inside us (inside our body or brain), but because we are situated, bodily, inside it—because our lives and our thoughts unfold in the depths of a mind that is not really ours, but is rather the Earth’s? What if like the hunkered owl, and the spruce bending above it, and the beetle staggering from needle to needle on that branch, we all partake of the wide intelligence of this world—because we’re materially participant,
with our actions and our passions, in the broad psyche of this sphere?
...
By suggesting that we all inhabit a common awareness, I am not claiming that your thoughts and dreams are the same as my thoughts and dreams, or that my awareness is the same as that of a magpie, or a coyote, or a mountain hemlock. For we each engage the wider intelligence from our own angle and place within it, each of us entwined with the breathing Earth through our particular skin. This ecological articulation of mind thus yields a radical and irreducible pluralism. It is only as palpable
bodies that we participate in the immersive mind of this planet, and as your body is different from mine in so many ways, and as our limbs and senses are so curiously different from those of the pileated woodpecker or the praying mantis, just so are our insights and desires richly different from one another.
Each creature’s experience is unique, to be sure, yet this is not at all because an autonomous awareness is held inside its particular body or brain. Sentience is born of the ongoing encounter, the contact, the tension and entwinement between each body and the breathing world that surrounds it. While each of
us encounters only a corner of this world, it is nonetheless the same outrageous world—the
Acı çekmiş ve parçalanmış insanların bizden bir eksikleri olduğunu düşünüyoruz. Ya bizden fazlaları varsa?
Split (2016)
