Nature is Physical, and Not
In my last post, I wrote the following.
We need to move away from a paradigm where Math is somehow different from French and different from Art or Music. Where Science is different from History and English literature. Where writing a sentence is in a different universe than skipping rope. What is called for here is a radical revisioning of Epistemology into a seamless, but not uniform, whole.
There is no more clarion call for the abolition of tunnel vision. Nature is minute and universal. Nature is physical, and not. Nature is patterned and chaotic. Humans and crabs share patterns, and don’t. The schizophrenic and the primrose are both natural, with different natures.4
We need a paradigm that allows us to see the rich connections that weave throughout, in fact are, our universe. The present paradigm is a faded, incomplete, black and white, sketch compared to a Kodachrome blast on the edge of Chaos where the greatest life for you, me, us, and all of them will happen.
As an aside, it occurred to me that I was stating my age. In 1961, Kodachrome II, (aka as just, “Kodachrome”) was a world-changing event. Just listen to Paul Simon (
). Or look at the National Geographic before and after. I was incredibly lucky to have a Biology teacher who had a passion for photographing animals, primarily invertebrates. If a book had photos of invertebrates, they were probably his. He was that good, and he was that generous. We got to take a whole lot of pictures using Hassleblad cameras and Kodachrome film. Those are among my fondest memories.
On rereading, perhaps the most significant, interesting, and controversial sentence is, “Nature is physical, and not.” With the possible exception of the Hawaiian Islands for a very brief period of time in the1820s1, every extensive culture studied has incorporated a significant functional spiritual component. Why does every culture studied, going back at least 50,000 years, demonstrate a spiritual dimension?5
This universality suggests a possible genetic component.2,3 Like all genetic dimensions of our existence, the effect of a spiritual component gene may vary between almost zero and almost ten where zero and ten are rare and maybe five is median. Atheists are offended by this idea, but the offense seems to be based on a confusion between spirituality and religion.4 Spirituality may have a genetic component, but religion is cultural.
What is spirituality? It seems that maybe the best short definition of spirituality is the feeling that everything is connected, including the self, and those connections are to something bigger than the self. Is everything connected to God? Perhaps. Is it an amorphous force that we name Luck? Perhaps. Or perhaps, Mother Nature, or anything else bigger and more life encompassing than us.
The connections give anything meaning. If there were ever a thing or an event that was totally disconnected from everything else, it could have no meaning. We assign meaning to every experience we have. It is the human condition in the degree we do so, but flatworms can assign meaning to experience, even when they lose their heads.6 It seems on face-value that virtually every mammal can make connections, and assign meaning to events both now and in the future.
When I was training Keiki, my co-working Tursiops, we had a routine where, on a hand signal, she would jump over me while I floated on my back with a small bucket of fish on my stomach. It was a new command, and she did it flawlessly several times. The next time I gave her the command, she hesitated, looked at me, submerged, came up beside me and pushed down on my stomach, I folded, and she got a full bucket of fish.
“Nature is physical, and not.” Without humans, there would be alternating periods of light and dark but there would be no sunsets. Sunsets are symbolic, connected, meaningful, and spiritual. Everything we do, everything we see, experience, and know has an underlying connection to something bigger than us, and therefore has a spiritual component, ignored or not.
And the more we learn, understand, and accept the connections that bind us together, humans and others, the more we understand that the World is flat. Nature really is physical and not. Nature is physical and spiritual.
1) https://www.hawaii-guide.com/content/posts/hawaiian-spirituality-life-within-the-ahupuaa
2) Hamer, Dean, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired Into Our Genes, Doubleday, 2004 ISBN 0-38550-058-0 | ISBN: 0-38550-058-0
3) Goldman, M. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired Into Our Genes. Nat Genet 36, 1241 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1204-1241
4) https://dnascience.plos.org/2022/12/22/in-search-of-a-religiosity-gene/
5) Henning, H., & Henning, M. (2021). Reflections on the nature of spirituality: Evolutionary context, biological mechanisms, and future directions. Journal for the Study of Spirituality, 11(2), 174–181. https://doi.org/10.1080/20440243.2021.1955453
6) An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in Planarians and its persistence through head regeneration | journal of experimental biology | the company of Biologists. https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/216/20/3799/11714/An-automated-training-paradigm-reveals-long-term