18 | A World Animated by Consciousness?

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

Rocks and plants, consciousness and self, and the implications of all that for what kind of world we live in and what it means to say “I”, or you and we for that matter. I began to scratch the surface of all this in the last Episode, in which I described 4 dimensions, at the very center of which were experience and awareness.

• One-Dimensional Consciousness: a subject experiences what happens. 
• Two-Dimensional: a subject experiences and is aware of experiencing.
• Three-Dimensional: a subject experiences, is aware, and is aware of being aware.
• Multi-Dimensional: a subject experiences, is aware, is aware of being aware, and is aware of the experiences and awareness of other things and beings (whether anyone or anything possesses this fourth type is for now an open question).

To keep myself to something “Episode length” for now I made a decision to limit my focus in two ways:

• only looking at types 1, 2, 3
• only looking at non-human aspects of our world

So, not people, and not the divine, at least not in the way I describe what could be divine consciousness in my multi-dimensional level.

But rocks are on the table, as are plants, mosses, molds, animals, insects, birds, reptiles, fish, germs, and the subatomic particles that make up all of that. Not that I can examine each individually, of course, I will need to be selective.

Here is the question I will explore:

Does anything in the cosmos have consciousness, within those parameters, and if so, what things (everything?), what type of consciousness, how? 

 

How to go about it? 

Throughout the podcast I regularly turn to philosophy, religion, physics, and the arts when I am looking for answers. Typically, I look at religious heritages last. I did it that way because I assumed some of my listeners would prioritize the value of physics as a source of truth over religion. 

What has been interesting to me is the fact that religious traditions have often seen, in different ways, what physics and philosophy theorized about and did so much earlier. Religious or spiritual ways of knowing are important, valid ways of knowing.

This time I am going to begin with religion. Though before I do so,  I will share a creative piece.

I am fascinated by trees and was exploring, imaginatively, the idea that trees might have memories and that their memories night include whatever has happened to them, or around them. 

I had begun to write a song about trees just before I started to prepare this Episode and completed it the day I recorded the podcast. Meaning for me, in “real time,” I finished it today. This is a very quick home-made recording, likely to change a lot, but raw as it may be, it seems to fit with the theme.  So, here it is, “Memory of Trees.”

 

Memories of Trees

The memories of trees are stored in ancient circles that are curling

Wheels upon wheels of stories unseen growth rings are unfurling

Trees measure out their lives, concentric passing years and days

A pattern of circles that shrinks, and swells, seasons of dry and rain

The memories of trees record the echoed laughter of the voices

Of the ones who made their plans in leaf shade dancing on their faces

 

Leaves carry our dreams in the silent trees

They may fall or they may burn 

Then turn back to the dust, 

Dreams and leaves still breathing, waiting to return

In the memories of trees

 

Memories of trees lean down to catch every eager whispered word

Turn them into the flowing sap with all the voices they have heard

Trees are waiting to tell the world all those things they’ve stored away

They embrace our songs within their rings, holding all we used to say

The memories of trees are swelling, shrinking, wide and narrow

Distilled into their amber sap to record a new tomorrow

 

Leaves carry our dreams in the silent trees

They may fall or they may burn 

Then turn back together to the dust, 

Dreams and leaves still breathing, waiting to return

In the memories of trees

In the memories of trees

In the memories of trees

Trees and memories, consciousness? That is my signal to go back to the way that religious heritages might answer my questions about the nature of consciousness and the self.

I will focus here on two religious heritages: animism and Hinduism. That is an incredibly simplistic way of stating things. There are many animisms, and many types of Hinduism, in fact in the latter case one could argue there is no such thing as Hinduism, per se, but that the term developed in the west to describe any number of more or less related expressions of spirituality the part of the world that we call South Asia.

Let me start with animism.

 

Animism

Why start with animism? I chose to do so because it is an ancient and nearly universal way of living in and understanding and seeing the world. Our ancestors were not stupid people, we should not equate lack of scientific education with intelligence. The animistic way of seeing and relating is, I presume, a storehouse of experiential wisdom and insight which is as important a source of knowledge as is, say, modern physics. 

I don’t pit them against each other, but rather see them as two ways of knowing, which in conversation with one another, can both serve to illuminate and teach us.

The indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Melanesia, Polynesia, and more all describe worldviews and practices and experiences that have been described as animism. Comparing them reveals that animism is not one single thing. There are animisms.

However, although animism when understood in the abstract is full of variety, there is a consistency when we view animism as essentially a way of relating to the various beings and things in the world.

That way of relating attributes sentience to other beings including persons, animals, plants, spirits, forces of nature, planets, wind, ocean, rivers, stones, metals, and especially more recently, even items of technology, such as cars, robots, or computers. 

I will look at animism in three lenses: 

First, even though I have said animism is more a way of relating to the world I will spend a little time on the conceptual aspect, or definition, of the term.  

Second, I want to talk about the functional aspects: that is, how it works, or how people who have this way of seeing the world operate within it.

And finally, I want to explore what I would call the “imaginative/intuitive/experiential” way of seeing and being aware of the world.

 

Animism as a Concept

One way to begin is to clarify what animism is not:

Obviously animism is not a form of materialism, which posits that only matter, materials, and movement exist. 

Nor is animism a form of monotheism, which posits a single god in the universe. 

Perhaps less obvious, it is not a form of polytheism, the belief that there are many gods and spirits that populate the world.

In animism sentience/consciousness is more akin to a vital force, a life force, something animates objects and plants and animals, etc. Hence the word “animism.” 

Both theism and polytheism tend towards the view that God or the gods are what we might call “transcendent” or “outside of” and other than the world and its various objects and creatures. In monotheism, while there is typically room for a variety of spiritual beings, one of those transcendent beings is primary, greater than the others, and generally is seen as the creator of them all, so different in kind, not just degree. Whereas in polytheism, while there may be different degrees or levels and qualities, the gods are basically all “of the same stuff.”

The main distinguishing feature of animism as a concept is that the spirits, or vital forces, are ‘immanent’ in the everyday world, even if not always perceivable. They are right here, in and with everything (or most things, depending upon which expression of animism we are looking at).

So far, I have referred to things in the plural: spirits, vital forces. But this is actually something which different types of animism see differently.

Some would say it is the same spirit that is alive and permeating everything. While other forms of animism would see the world to be inhabited by energies, forces, and/or spirits. 

Which leads to a question about another “theism” namely, pantheism. Pantheism is the view that everything is not just pervaded by spirit but is spirit. Animism does not equate the spirits, or a single spirit with the world, but sees the world as inhabited, animated, and acted upon by those spirits (or spirit).

Moving from this more abstract way of understanding animism, I will touch on how such a view functions, or how people with such a way of seeing the world live within it.

 

Animism as a Way of Living in an Animated World

At the very core of the functional dimension of animism is the understanding that there is a reciprocity between all things and all beings, and in particular between human beings and the wider collective of animate beings with which human beings are interconnected, or to use my earlier term, entangled.

While all humans share in this reciprocal relationship with everything else, one of the primary ways that this reciprocity is negotiated is through particular people who seem more than usually adept at navigating the ways of the forces and spirits which animate the world.

Such people are sometimes referred to with terms that are used pejoratively: witch doctors, witches, or more commonly perhaps for anthropologists, shamans. I am more interested here in the functions than the persons or the roles, much less the names given to those roles. Because what these “special” people do is something that is in fact available to all people, and thus shows us how the world can operate. According to the way animism sees it, anyway. 

As such, I will list the following functions just as they are, as functions. In animism, human beings:

• have access to, and influence in, the world of both good and bad spirits.
• have the ability to heal various ailments of the body and of the spirit.
• have the ability to mediate communication between the human and the spirit worlds. 
• have the ability to obtain solutions to problems by consulting the spirits. 

As important as it is to have a grasp of the conceptual and functional aspects of animism, I am especially interested in ways of seeing consciousness and self-hood as animism might describe those.

 

Animism and Consciousness

I will set aside for a moment the type of animism in which there is one spirit pervading everything, and focus on the view that there are plural spirits and forces.

Are all these spirits and forces of the same type, different examples of the same thing? To illustrate, are spirits like plants in a forest where there are many types of plants, but they are all plants? Or is it more like a forest in which every plant is the same kind of plant, say, a Lodgepole Pine?

Animism suggests that the spirits and forces that inhabit our world are more like the forest full of different plants: all spirits but different types.

Some forms of animism, for example, describe the spirits of animals as “people”, like us, because they can grow, and breathe, whereas stones are alive, but not “personal.”

This opens the question as to how animism might view my descriptive dimensions. It would seem that some things are not conscious beyond the level of “experiencing”, whereas others seem to also be aware, and it seems in some examples, are also aware of being aware. 

For example, in the view of the Western Apache of North America, certain locations contain memories and also the wisdom to help people to make the right decisions. Meaning, apparently, they can also communicate (or more accurately, the consciousnesses that inhabit these places can communicate).

 

“And…. ”Machines”?

I have referred a few times in passing to the fact that in some animistic ways of imagining and seeing the world, “consciousness”, in the form of spirits and forces, can be attributed to machines, to human made objects, technological items which may at first appear to be without the agency or life force of other things and beings. However, some animists describe “machines” as having “agency”, vitality, a life force, and even personhood. 

That raises a lot of questions for thinking about AI, which I need to save for another time.

 

The Gita

The second religious heritage I want to look at is not a heritage itself, but a text which has inspired multiple heritages, the Bhagavad Gita. I have consulted the Gota in prior Episodes, and it is a rich and vast world of oceanic depths! 

I will try to summarize some of the main concepts, knowing full well that the best way to learn from the Gita is to return to it over and over and slowly begin to gain an inner intuitive grasp of its voice, flow, and unique wisdom. My summary is focused just on things related to consciousness.

I need to explain three terms used to describe the nature of consciousness, and the self: prakriti, purusha, and buddhi.

 

Prakriti

This is what we would normally experience and describe as the material nature of the universe. It is experienced through six senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, the mind, which is seen as one of the senses because like our other senses it is part of how we engage with and experience the world.

Prakriti itself is unconscious matter, uncaused, it has no beginning, will not end.

Prakriti is in a reciprocal relationship with what we think of as our “selves” because all of our actions find their source in prakriti. Ultimately, according to the Gita, none of us actually do anything, not as independent actors, we only seem to act as such. In the end it is prakriti and the small s self, or small a atman, which is embedded in prakriti, which all combine in what we call “action”. This is one of those oceanic depths, and I will have to leave it here for now!

 

Purusha

The second term to explain is purusha. This is what we might call the spiritual self, or pure consciousness. According to the Gita, there is an eternal, unchanging consciousness that is aware of and enables prakriti. This is the true subject, or “I”, it is our true self, though not perceived, except in the process of enlightenment and transformation as outlined by the Gita. 

 

Buddhi

Finally, we come to the term buddhi. This is the faculty of insight and wisdom and is vitally connected to the process of transformation that the Gita teaches, which involves liberation from the ways that we are “stuck” in and by being imbedded in prakriti, and the deluded perceptions we have of reality, and of ourselves (involving both atman and Atman).

What then does Gita say about consciousness? Given that the mind is one of the senses, operating within and as part of prakriti, consciousness in the sense of being aware and in the sense of the awareness of being aware, is not the same pure or ultimate consciousness, which is something wholly other, beyond awareness. 

At the end of the day, the “I” which is speaking in the person of Krishna in the Gita is an “I” that pervades everything in the cosmos, and in which every other “i” is ultimately to be found, or ultimately exists. 

In the 15th section of the Gita, beginning from verse 13, Krishna says things like “entering the earth I support all beings with energy…abide in the bodies of all living beings…entered into the hearts of all beings…from me come memory and knowledge…” 

What then does the Gita say about what in the cosmos is conscious and in what way? 

What we typically think of when we say I am conscious or aware or know or remember, according to Gita, is all enmeshed in prakriti, and is small a atman, small s self. Consciousness itself is the “I” Krishna refers to, which is ultimately singular, one big C consciousness.

 

Where the Great Spirit Lives

Given that I included a creative offering earlier that is probably more akin to the way animism sees consciousness, I want to offer something perhaps more in line with the Gita, though it was inspired by an experience in the mountains of California.  

I read that when white men first asked indigenous peoples what they called the high mountains we know as the Sierra Nevadas, the answer was “Inyo” which the white men thought was a name of a place, but which for the people was simply descriptive, “that is where the great Spirit lives.”

Given that the Gita (as well as some forms of animism) see the consciousness of the world in terms of a single Spirit, as the ultimate source of, or kind of, consciousness, this song seemed fitting to share here.

It can be sung as if the singer is singing to the great Spirit, or can be heard as if the great Spirit is singing to you and I. 

 

Inyo

Hey are you listening to me today? 

Hey, will your ears hear what I hear today?

I hear what you hear

You hear what I hear

 

Hey are you seeing what I see today?

Hey, will you look for what I show today?

I see what you see

You see what I see

 

Hey, are you feeling what I feel today?

Hey, will your heartbeat echo mine today?

I feel what you feel

You feel what I feel

 

Hey are we walking the same trail today?

Hey, will your feet fit in my shoes today?

I walk in your shoes

You walk in my shoes

 

Conclusions and Transition:

I asked earlier, “Does anything in the cosmos have consciousness, and if so, what things (everything?), what type of consciousness, how?”

In animism, everything or at least most everything, is conscious in some way.  There are forms of animism which would suggest that this consciousness is that of multiple spirits or energies or forces, and forms which say it is the same spirit animating everything. The degree to which animism clarifies how the spirits or spirit might be aware, or be aware of being aware, versus just experiencing things that happen, depends really on the type of animism we explore. But it does seem that all three of what I called One-, Two-, and Three-Dimensional Consciousness can find expression within animism.

In the Gita, there is ultimately a Single, Universal, big S Self. What we experience as our individual consciousness is actually part of prakriti, and thus not ultimately real.

Are plants or rocks conscious? Animism would say yes. It is not a question the Gita asks, but I would speculate the answer to be about the same as that for small a atman: whatever consciousness all things might possess is enmeshed in prakriti, and not ultimately, big C Consciousness. 

In the next Episodes I will come back to philosophy and physics as well as other religious heritages. As I look ahead at the next Episode, which I have not yet begun to draft, I will simply quote what I said at the end of the last Episode:

“Between now and then I assume the steps to explore these mysteries will get clearer, though the mystery itself will just get more mysterious if prior Episodes are any indication!”

So, until next time…