What Astrobiology Can Teach Us About Visionary Leadership (full version)
What Astrobiology Can Teach Us About Visionary Leadership
n. patedakis
Astrobiology and leadership? What kind of con job is this?
In fact—perhaps a surprising fact to many readers—we can almost learn some incredibly powerful lessons about life and leadership from astrobiology, and, in the interest of getting us all interested in actually learning some of those lessons, I am running an anti-con job here. These ideas can evoke wonder and awe, and they could change our life and our capacity for leadership and eldership.
Besides, if I wanted to pull a real con job, I’d put a brain scan image somewhere in this short essay. It would make what I say seem more scientific and satisfying to you. I could throw in some neurobabble as well—mentioning your nucleus acumbens for instance, and its role in motivating leaders and their followers.
We have a big market for such novelties as the neuroscience of leadership, vagus nerve mastery for the up-and-coming visionary, brain-based team-building, and so on. But we’ve sold ourselves short. We need to think at an intergalactic scale. I should be able to get maximal attention and confidence from you, not by putting a brain scan image here, but by putting a spiral galaxy . . . maybe NGC 3147, 1232, 2082, 4414, or 6814 (a few of my favorites).
In the spirit of Cosmic-scale vision, I’m here to tell you about what astrobiology can tell you about visionary leadership. Yes, you read that correctly. We don’t want Earth to look like some backwater planet where people can only lead from one fiscal quarter to the next, do we? Why play the small game?
First take-away suggestion: We’ve got an untapped market in the astrobiology of everything. Soon you’ll be seeing an astrobiologically-informed therapist and practicing astrobiologically-informed mindfulness and yoga. This perspective will transform the world of life coaching, to say nothing of its effect on meaning of life coaching.
Executives everywhere should prepare themselves to go big—multiverse big—or go home (but not with E.T., because E.T. doesn’t give rides to small thinkers). I’ve got a coder working on an astriobiological dieting and productivity app (that’s right: a two-in-one), and we’re ready for angel investors. Saying that after the multiverse thing might seem like small thinking, but there will one day be a far more literal Miss Universe pageant, and we have one heck of a lot to do to get ready. We all have to get more productive, and more fit.
Though, as far as the pageant goes, if the Tralfamadorians are correct that we have no fewer than 7 genders, and if other worlds have similar or even more complex genderfication (there goes the galactic neighborhood), we may have some debate about whom to send—though I will likely vote for Wangarĩ Maathai, Sona Jobarteh, or maybe a Bollywood star . . . not just beautiful people, but beautiful people who can dance. We may find out that UFO visitations were Universe Pageant scouting trips, or intergalactic modelling agents scoping out the competition. (By the way, those who think Wangarĩ Maathai can’t compete because she seems to have died need to get free from habitual notions of time and space. From a certain perspective, I seem to have died too.)
This is all going to get serious. This essay really could shift your thinking, but I’m playing it a little cheeky in part because times are tough, and we all need to laugh at ourselves. That includes laughing at science, and laughing at some of our leaders. Or most of our leaders. Wait . . . do we have leaders? We do have science, though! Right? Because we want to consider the science of astrobiology here.
As a philosopher raised in the dominant culture, I used to look to what we call science anytime I wanted to know about something. As a boy I thought of going into the sciences—Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla were my heroes—and as a young philosopher I gravitated toward philosophy of science. To this day, I still look to the sciences, even though I now mostly do so to watch science catch up to philosophy—not the “philosophy” of the contemporary university system, but the wisdom traditions that stand out as the pinnacles of human realization.
“Science” has become so ascendant that nowadays we get a little giddy when someone mentions, for instance, the neuroscience of leadership or whatever, even though we can’t lead an organization by pressing on our reticular formation, or flicking the ventral striatum of our team (or our child, friend, life partner, etc.). For actionable and effective guidance on leading well, living well, and loving well, we can do no better than the teachings of the wisdom traditions. However, for the most part we haven’t yet admitted our lack of passion for wisdom. We kinda don’t care.
Thankfully, the budding neuroscience of wisdom can change all of that. You are one transcranial magnetic stimulation away from becoming Yoda. If you’ve had a few cups of ayahuasca, you may already have achieved at least the level of Obi-Wan Kenobe. Can you imagine the possibilities once we bring the transcranial magnetic stim machines to the Amazon?
But let’s take matters seriously a moment, because we don’t have time for levity (levity is one of the phase spaces our astrobio-productivity app can minimize for you so you can squeeze more out of your day), and we have to think seriously indeed about our intergalactic reputation. The Federation may one day come, and we want to look mature enough to join.
The good news: Our astrobiologists—a group of highly intelligent and sometimes cross-disciplinary thinkers—have done solid work that finally confirms some of the teachings of the wisdom traditions at cosmic scale. Of course, the Buddhist philosophers, as well as many Indigenous traditions, have long had a cosmic vision (or cosmogram) that included many inhabited worlds, with all manner of beings inhabiting them.
Those cosmograms matter less at the moment than the things we will focus on here—things that, despite my cheekiness, really do merit sincere attention, affectionate attention even. In fact, the awesomeness and gravity of these things gives the ultimate explanation for the spirit of levity. We need to keep a light heart with this kind of stuff. Something in our culture doesn’t want us to think about them it deeply. Our ego recoils. But, wisdom has the last laugh—to ego’s great disappointment.
Let’s consider a recent article called, “Intelligence as a planetary scale process,” by Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker (those are their real names . . . no anonymity to protect innocent scientists). Big thanks to the authors (or whoever paid the bill) for making it an open access piece, so that you can go and read it in detail after I summarize:
International Journal of Astrobiology 21, 47–61
https://doi.org/10.1017/S147355042100029X
Or, wait for the TED talk. It’s coming, if it didn’t already happen. Astrobiologists are hip, and getting hipper (did you catch that, angel investors?).
This is serious science though, by seriously bright researchers. And I loved reading it. Their abstract takes lines from the body of the article and does a nice job framing key suggestions. Here’s an abstraction from that abstract:
“Conventionally, intelligence is seen as a property of individuals. However, it is also known to be a property of collectives. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which the appearance of technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, and thus might be seen not as something which happens on a planet but to a planet, much as some models propose the origin of life itself was a planetary phenomenon. Our approach follows the recognition among researchers that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, as opposed to the more traditional focus on individual species.” (47)
They came out with phasers set to mind-blowing. Can we fathom this? We have gotten intelligence wrong!
This may explain why we have a Flynn effect (apparently rising IQs) while also having the cultural circus (and cultural crisis) we find in the dominant culture, especially the U.S. Put another way: IQ goes up along with the number of species sent to extinction, the level of toxins in our world (including our own bodies), and the number of clowns elected to public office (genius clowns, of course).
We do seem to have a confusion about intelligence, and if our IQs get any higher, we may find them suddenly bottoming out.
The perceptive reader may already have some insight as to why astrobiology matters for leadership, sustainability, democracy, and indeed the flourishing of humanity and all our kin (the whole community of life). But let’s lay it out with a little more clarity.
The astrobiologists have a fairly clear set of objectives, including understanding how we can identify life in other parts of the Cosmos. If we send a probe somewhere, or if we turn a powerful telescope in some direction and peer disturbingly far into the distance (and the past), how can we best detect signs of life? Does life have a signature we can recognize? If it does, will we find the most interesting cases and the easiest detections at a planetary scale?
And so we come to the issues that end up intersecting with our own lives, in the workaday world, and in our spiritual and cultural aspirations: What is life? What is intelligence? What is intention?
In asking these questions, astrobiologists encounter all sorts of interesting data and come up with all sorts of interesting hypotheses and potentials that could improve our lives and increase our intelligence—far beyond the narrow measure of the Flynn effect.
However, we can’t possibly resolve these questions—or reap the benefits from serious inquiry into them—outside of what we refer to as philosophy. Even if we try to approach them “scientifically,” we have to make philosophical decisions about how to proceed. Philosophy means “how we do things,” and wisdom means doing things in skillful ways that cultivate the whole of life onward.
There is no such thing as “science” in the abstract. Science arises as part of the interdependent development of actual scientists living in actual cultures in actual worlds. Every scientist has a philosophy of science that goes together (not always harmoniously) with a philosophy of life.
To put it in archaic terms: Science is and always will be the handmaiden of philosophy. And the authors of this paper on astrobiology definitely venture into philosophical territory as they grapple with these powerful questions.
We have to grapple with them too, in order to get some benefit from astrobiological research (especially if we want to usher in the astrobiological revolution and its many promising apps, therapies, TED talks, and other schemes of the self-help catastrophe). We could begin by challenging the contrast the authors draw in the above passage. It’s not “intelligence” as a “property” of “individuals” vs “intelligence” as a “property” of “collectives” that holds us back here—though that certainly fits into the larger picture. But the larger picture goes beyond this way of putting things, and it suggests that what we are isn’t confined to a skull or a bag of skin.
For any good Christian (and we could include other religions too), this won’t sound totally surprising. Nor will it shock many Indigenous people, nor anyone who has followed cognitive science since the development of cybernetics. Likewise, for anyone familiar with Gaia theory or even a variety of nondualistic philosophies, this will sound unsurprising.
As one example of the various appearances of this idea, Gregory Bateson, in his marvelous book, Mind and Life: A Necessary Unity, lays out a definition of mind that not only allows mind to transcend the skull and skin, but also recognizes mind in systems we might habitually view as not “having” a mind. Bateson practiced an ecological view of mind, and that takes some contemplation to get our heads around—I mean get our ecologies around. Work by such thinkers as Francisco Varela, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Andy Clark, Anthony Chemero, Evan Thompson, Mark Rowlands, John Dewey, C.G. Jung, and a host of others (who either predated or carried forward ecological theories of mind) all give us a view of mind as a process that transcends the skull and skin.
We could make a leap here and say that both we and the astrobiologists have to consider the difference between mind and life as we know it, and mind and life as we don’t know it. On the one hand, this indicates that mind and life could appear in forms we have never experienced here, and thus would evade our detection if we don’t arrive at some sort of essential signature of mind and life.
For instance, maybe somewhere in the vast Cosmos, silicone- or even plasma-based life forms have appeared. That may sound a bit crazy, but however we want to try and hypothesize about it, mind and life could appear in ways we haven’t yet imagined. If astrobiologists could come up with a basic signature of mind and life—perhaps along the lines of pink noise, which tends to appear when we find mind and life, but perhaps sometimes appears in their absence—if scientists could give a hard definition of mind and life independent of particular forms, then perhaps we could detect mind and life even if it appears in forms that differ radically from what we have become used to.
Some astrobiologists thus think we should forget about looking for a biosignature, and instead look for a “technosignature”. They have not asked if we should seek a sophosignature (a signature of wisdom), a philosignature (a signature of love), or a kaliasignature (a signature of beauty). And they haven’t asked what those signatures would look like if the beings signing them express a lot more wisdom, love, and beauty than we do. Sure, we have loads of love here, and loads of beauty, and even some exceptional cases of wisdom. But we don’t know what a planet might look like if it had an order of magnitude more wisdom, love, and beauty than we do.
That’s one functional meaning of “mind and life as we don’t know it”—that we may not know how to find life that looks very different, life that appears in ways we might find startling and inscrutable. Another functional meaning of “mind and life as we don’t know it” may prove far more important, considered both from the standpoint of wisdom and also from the standpoint of future engagement with life from other worlds. “Mind and life as we don’t know it” should serve, first and foremost, as a reminder that we don’t have the fullest understanding of mind and life right here—our own mind and life, and the mind and life of our kin and our world.
We lack both a more holistic insight into and deeper reverence for the mind and life we find ourselves embedded in. Indeed, we mostly fail to grok this embeddedness, this interwovenness, and thus fail to integrate it into our thinking, so that we could manifest a greater intelligence. This matters more than the other kind of mind and life detection, the kind the astrobiologists seemed focused on.
We need to detect our own mind and life before ramping up to detect the mind and life of other beings. In doing so, we may also come to understand beings in far-flung places, because we may directly verify the nature of our own mind and life, and thus realize things about the nature of all minds and all life.
We can also approach this in another way: We most certainly have intelligence on this planet, however, in reference to humans, we must not only admit that we lack planetary intelligence, but we must also admit that humans lack ecological intelligence at even relatively small scales.
For instance, we have all become aware that trees communicate and cooperate, in an interwoven ecology comprised not only of multiple tree species, but of a vast number of non-tree species as well, such as bacteria, fungi, birds, and others. Moreover, the thinking of these ecologies incorporates elements such as fire and water, and processes such as storms and seasons. If we sit with these places—even vicariously through the work done by forest ecologists—we may experience a sense of awe as we recognize the extremely elegant thinking they manifest, the elegance of mind and life itself.
For instance, we find in certain ecologies that, in winter, trees who have lost their leaves receive extra nutrients from evergreens, and that when the leafy trees leaf again, and have extra energy to share, they give back to the evergreens. The ecology manifests all manner of mindful practices like this, including the ways it works with fire for the creation and continuation of life.
Similarly, many of us know that certain whales eat krill, then make their sacred offerings back to the sea—what some humans term “waste”—which gives vital nutrients to plankton, which then feed the krill. Even in this seemingly simple loop we can directly recognize a sophisticated and elegant long-term thinking, alive and alove. It expresses the interwovenness of life, the interwovenness of mind, and the wonder of mutual nourishment, mutual illumination, and mutual liberation.
Humans in the grips of what we can refer to as conquest consciousness don’t tend to think this way—at least not skillfully, over long time courses. Obviously we can successfully share resources in our households, and even in our communities. We even feed other species at times. Moreover, we benefit from these activities of thinking. Roughly half of every breath we take comes from the plankton-and-whale thinking process, along with other ocean-thinking processes. Of course, ocean-thinking is Earth-thinking.
All of this tends to remain invisible to most humans. And we should point out that we have a hard time understanding other humans—conquest consciousness tends to shut down mutual illumination and mutual liberation. The first step in looking for intelligence “somewhere else” is to look in cultures and traditions currently foreign to us, and then to look at the larger community of life and the interwovenness of mind we tend not to perceive.
Even if we start to conceptually understanding these activities in the abstract, we don’t quite know how to participate in them, skillfully, gracefully, creatively, and wisely. The latter term includes the others, as would lovingly and with exceptional clarity of mind.
In acknowledging we don’t think in these ways, we’re talking about basic orientation here, a style of consciousness and a holistic practice of life. Evaluated from a holistic perspective, our practice of mind and life clearly orients toward fragmentation, extraction, clinging, confusion, and a lack of intimacy with the interwovenness of the World. Put another way: Our practice of life clearly lacks wisdom.
This in turn leads to degradation—of the human mind and the natural world. This stands as a most obvious indicator of our lack of wisdom. We can also verify our lack of wisdom in as simple a measure as inequality, which has so long plagued the dominant culture that we take it as some kind of inevitability of “civilization”.
We have tried to overcome this lack, but we did so in rather unwise ways. Yes, it’s quite ironic: We tried to overcome ignorance on the basis of an ignorant mind. This general attempt has a name in the dominant culture: “science”.
In dominant culture science, we have only recently developed family systems theory, and only even more recently developed internal family systems theory. Such developments arise from the shaky tender legs of early insight into the mind of ecology and the ecology of mind. In a similar vein, dominant culture science has encountered the challenges of quantum phenomena, the development of various forms of systems theory and nonlinear dynamics, and of course the science of ecology itself.
Ecological thinking appeared millennia ago in other cultures, and we can also find examples of it in conquest cultures—mainly in the spiritual traditions or wisdom traditions of those cultures. That’s where we find the best expressions of it. The “science” comes later, and comes altogether with further fragmentation that we expect to see in a culture mainly rooted in ignorance.
A culture of ignorance can certainly develop significant insights into “systems thinking” in the abstract. A wisdom culture, on the other hand, practices this thinking in all aspects of its activity, and education in a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty orients itself in the practice and realization of more skillful styles of consciousness, more genuinely ecological and spiritual styles of consciousness (seeing ecology and spirituality not as two different things).
By and large, the dominant culture doesn’t consistently think in this way, and instead cultivates a conquest style of consciousness. This means we engage in fragmented thought, which goes together with fragmenting the landscape and the society. It means we follow our personal agendas, no matter what Nature and our kin in Nature have to say about it.
It also, and rather centrally, means we take and take and take, giving back far less than we take. Because of the mutuality that constitutes the World we share, this means we degrade the World, polluting, breaking down ecologies of mind, creating fires, floods, and other disasters that destroy without functional creativity, disengaged from communion and communication with the community of life, so that we don’t functionally participate in the thinking of larger ecologies of mind that transcend the human.
In short: We don’t live our lives as the skillful, creative thinking of the planet or even relatively smaller but still significant ecologies of mind. The tragic consequences of this appear not only everywhere we look, but in our very bodies. Most of us now have plastic in our blood, and plastic in our lungs. We have all manner of toxins in our air, water, and soil. We have reached an unthinkable situation of putting at risk the conditions of life upon which we all depend.
Perhaps we could consider flipping astrobiology on its head. Not literally. Literally, it doesn’t have a head. That may be part of the trouble.
Let’s get to a most serious suggestion: What if the signs of intelligent life the astrobiologists might look for should in fact count as signs of stupidity? Or, perhaps the signs of life we show here on Earth count as stupidity?
For instance, maybe one of the clearest signs of stupidity is when a species develops “science” and “technology” that destroys the conditions of life upon which that very species depends. Maybe another excellent indicator of stupidity is the attempt of a species to leave a perfectly beautiful and abundant planet, so they can go to a barren planet, or go into stasis and live in a big machine for many years.
The Star Trek version of the future seems interesting until we reflect on how much time these Federation beings spend living in a big machine. No horses. No dogs. No birds. No rivers. No sunrise and sunset. No freshly baked pie made with apples from the tree growing outside—the one with birds singing in it every summer morning, the one the bees visit, the one we sit under quietly, enjoying the softness of living grass and the miracle of Earth.
Maybe among the most intelligent species in the Cosmos we would find many whose great intelligence allowed them to appreciate the preciousness of their world, such that they sought to care for it and live in attunement with it, rather than try to alter and extract from it until forced to seek an escape, racing for a narrow window in which “technology” grows just fast enough that the species doesn’t go extinct before it can achieve planetary desertion. We could call this, “The escape from reality curve,” and our astrobiologists now seek it. It’s not a real escape from reality, but an attempt to escape, made on the basis of ignorance.
Any species thus racing through the universe might remain locked in conquest consciousness. In which case, we may want to hide from them rather than seek them out. Nevertheless, if we encounter them in any way, we will likely find them “intelligent,” because we seem to mistake intelligence for the cleverness of conquest consciousness. They might impress us because they would manifest something like human ignorance on psychological steroids.
We could take a different approach to all of this. We could try to understand life right here—life as we so far don’t know it. And we could consider that maybe—just maybe—a few other species have valued this “inward journey” more than they have valued any “outward journey”. Which may even mean that they could contact us in ways we so far haven’t fully accepted as possibilities.
Here we will take a final bizarre turn, because at this point we can acknowledge both the UFO/UAP phenomena along with the DMT phenomena. That’s right: UFOs and psychedelics. We have really gone AWAL in our quest to understand what astrobiology can teach us about leadership. And we’ll need a leader’s instincts to finish our trek.
But the rewards of finishing our trek make it worthy of our efforts. If we can stick with it, we will have a summary of insights that can turn an ordinary leader into a Cosmic superhero.
But it won’t be easy. We enter frightening territory here. The most unknown aspects of reality strike the most fear in us.
We don’t fear astrobiology the way we fear the sorts of things we’re getting at right now. And I wish I could be more conventionally humorous about it. But we have to allow for a little bit of sobriety, and not risk making fun of something that our laughter will allow us to simply dismiss out of hand.
It’s not a matter of creating a false idol, but something like the opposite: not allowing the idols of the mind to distract us from something that feels threatening to the ego and the culture precisely because it reveals a frightening truth—or at least a frightening possibility that in turn would lead to a frightening truth. We have to do our best to take a deep breath, release what we think we know, and turn our mind like a mirror toward reality, to see what appears there.
Let’s focus on DMT, a compound produced in our own brains and throughout the living world. Why is it in our brains and throughout the living world? As of now, we can’t say why.
What happens when we take a significant dose of DMT? The psychedelic explorer Terrance McKenna was eager to tell us all about it. Reflecting on his words, we must keep in mind that he describes an experience reliably verified by many people.
In other words: DMT differs from other psychedelics because it doesn’t produce a merely “personal” “trip” in which different people see very different things. Instead, the DMT experience involves reliably similar experiences, with certain features appearing again and again, despite differences in culture, life experience, and expectations of those working with this medicine. And these details seem improbable and mysterious.
Here are some of McKenna’s core reflections, though I encourage the reader to listen to (or read) the full talk:
This, to me, this experience is of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave. And why religions have not been built around it, why empires have not risen and fallen around the control of its sources, why theology has not enshrined it as its central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world—I don’t know. I can tell the secret. As you notice, nothing shuts me up. But why this is not in four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet, I cannot understand. Because I don’t know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for.
It’s an incredible challenge to human understanding to try and make sense of this. . . . This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the it’s-only-a-hallucination thing—that horsesh*t is just passé. I mean, reality is only a hallucination, for crying out loud! Haven’t you heard? So that takes care of that. . .What we’ve got here, folks, is an intelligent entelechy of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason. And the possibilities can be logically enumerated. What we’ve got here is either: this is an extraterrestrial—you know, evolved around a different star, possibly with a different biology, may not even be made of matter, came across an enormous distance sometime maybe long ago, has some agenda which we may or may not be able to conceive of. This is it. The real thing. As the little girl said in Poltergeist: “They’re here!” So that’s one possibility. That’s just one possibility. And I present these without judgement, because I’m not sure.
If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society, and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion-ton beryllium ships on the United Nations plaza—in other words, if it were subtle—I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say, “Let’s analyze these people. Okay, they’re kinda hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called ‘getting loaded.’ And when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them. So let’s hide inside the load and we’ll talk to them from there, and they’ll never realize that we’re of a different status than pink elephants.”[1]
In an earlier talk, McKenna elaborated it a little differently:
I do think that, if you were an extraterrestrial and you had an ethos of non-invasiveness and you wanted to have a very low-key interaction with an intelligent species, the way to do it would be to come at it through an intoxication. You don’t appear with trillion-ton beryllium ships over major cities. You know? “We have been studying you for 50,000 years.” I don’t think it’s done like that. I think it’s more like: you find a dimension in the cultural world of the species you’re trying to study where weirdness is sanctioned. And then you set up your lemonade stand in that world. In this case the world of psychedelic intoxication.[2]
In the later talk, he considers two other possible explanations of the DMT phenomena: That it puts us in touch with a parallel continuum, and that it puts us in touch with beings who have a special relationship with humans. That seems a bit anthropocentric, a speculation based on human privilege. We might rather imagine that these beings have an interest in all sentient beings, and are excited to communicate with any being able to enter into relationship with them—aided by whatever means. In any case, McKenna considers the possibility as follows:
First of all, they love us! They care for some reason. Whoever and whatever they are, they’re far more aware of us than we are aware of them. I mean, witness the fact that they welcome me. So, is it possible that, at the end of the twentieth century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we’re about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we’re about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort.
I mean, this is hair-raising to me, and I’ve spent my whole adolescence and early adulthood getting free from Catholicism and its assumptions. And I never imagined that a thorough exploration of life’s mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are gestations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of a metamorphic stage like the pupa of a butterfly. And so this is deep water, because we are fairly agitated over the fact that we fear the planet is dying and us with it. This stuff raises the issue that you don’t know what dying is. Therefore, it’s very uncertain exactly what sort of an attitude we should take to it. And as I say, I am not advocating a position. Mysteries are not unsolved problems, they are mysteries. When you stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it is still utterly and completely mysterious. But I enjoy talking to people about this, because I think that the human body, the human mind—these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny. And millions of people, perhaps billions of people, have gone to the grave without knowing that this is possible—this experience that I’ve just described to you.[3]
This all seems rather incredible, of course. At least to most of us.
But which is the incredible part? In Ancient Greek culture, initiation into the mysteries seems to have included McKenna’s suggestion as a central insight the initiates might arrive at. In other words, the Ancient Greek Mysteries directly revealed to the fortunate initiate that “death has no sting,” and that both the Cosmos and we ourselves are more vast than our ego can imagine.
More importantly, this means we are more vast, and the whole Cosmos more sacred, than our daily life reflects. We will only find redemption and healing when we start to live in attunement with our own nature and the nature of reality itself.
McKenna makes reference to “extraterrestrials,” with a reasonable suggestion that hasn’t appeared very commonly in our science fiction. In our science fiction, we focus on technology, because of our biases on the nature of life (life as we know it)—and thus the nature of mind and the nature of the Cosmos. We consistently imagine machines mediating interstellar and intergalactic relationships.
McKenna implies two things: That an advanced culture might think it exceedingly unskillful (perhaps impolite, but also rather alarming, and potentially wasteful of “resources”) to simply show up in a giant spaceship, and—an equally important point—they may find it totally unnecessary to relate in that way.
We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, let me acknowledge that, although I have no conventional humor to offer here, that’s because I find all of this so Cosmically hilarious that I can barely keep myself from having a laughter-induced hernia. And it gets funnier. Trust me: Your soul will laugh with me, even if your ego rolls its eyes in confusion, disdain, or some combination of the two.
To get at the deeper comedy, for just a moment we’ll indulge the humbling suggestion that human ignorance significantly limits our understanding of ourselves, our own mind, and the nature of reality. That already seems comical: We get pushed around in our lives mostly by our ignorance rather than by our understanding—because that understanding is so incomplete and even wrong.
If we consider the possibility of a civilization a million years older than ours, we might at least pause in wonder at the insights they may have arrived at. We obviously can’t really imagine those insights, so our wonder comes from the recognition that a culture may have arrived at insights we can’t possibly imagine. They might have found out truly incredible things, and this possibility gives credence to an idea we have come to trivialize, because of how threatening it may be to our ego.
This idea gets suggested in a variety of ways, but the one I have in mind comes from the great scientist JBS Haldane. It appears in a passage in which he contemplates an imaginary organism with a very special sensory awareness.
It’s a being quite strange from our human perspective. This being perceives vibration or periodic changes. Haldane grants this imaginary being seventy octaves, from one vibration per second all the way up to the gamma range. This is something like extending the faculty of sound to our other senses.
Haldane further grants this being a skill we have in our experience of sound, but not so much in color: the capacity to analyze a blend of vibrations into their parts, the way a person with perfect pitch can hear a chord and detect the individual notes in it. This goes together with an ability to place the vibrations into a spectrum, as we place notes on a scale.
This being then gets powers we humans don’t possess, except in marginal ways. So, for instance, this being can perceive temperature. This being can also discern chemical substances from one another because different chemical substances absorb radiation differently, and this being will discern the vibrations being absorbed. Humans can do this in a limited way, within the visible spectrum of light. Some substances have distinct colors to us because of the parts of the vibrational spectrum reflected and absorbed, but our relationship to color is far more rudimentary than this being’s.
Speaking in quantitative terms, this being would know far more about the “objects” it perceives than we do. However, the things we take for granted as primary qualities—things like size, shape, position, and perhaps even motion—would seem like secondary qualities to this being. Size and shape aren’t vibrations. This being would perceive relative differences in vibrations, and then, on that basis, surmise the size and shape of “objects” it perceives. It may never arrive at the concept of an “object” in the first place.
Why does any of this matter? Because it means an inversion of core trends in the dominant culture, trends that still affect our science and our society. We treat the world as obviously made up of objects, and many philosophers and scientists continue to think of things like color as “secondary” qualities that the human mind adds to the primary “matter” of “reality”. But what if “matter” isn’t primary at all?
Haldane bases this more strongly on “biology” than we need to. We can try to meet him in the middle, so to speak. Our experience arises in part affected by some of our biological capacities, but also critically because of a particular style of consciousness (we could call it conquest consciousness) and the indoctrination practices of the dominant culture that make that style of consciousness what it is. These forces come to together to create our “common sense” insistence on the primacy of something we call “matter”. It puts us in a world of “objects” we manipulate and control.
Haldane invites us to envision the overthrow of “common sense”. And he points out that science itself now has to face this as a genuine possibility:
The attempt to build up a world-view from the end which common sense regards as wrong, is, at any rate, being made, and with very fair success. I suspect that it is of far greater importance for metaphysics than the entire efforts of the philosophers who, from Kant onwards, have attempted to build on the ground cleared by Hume. If it were successful it might lead to philosophical systems in which the real elements in the external world were the secondary qualities of colour, tone, and so forth, rather than the primary qualities of the materialist’s world. One may perhaps speculate that in colour vision we have a real perception of light quanta, though the analogy with hearing renders such a theory dubious.
If we are anything alike, your eyes may glaze over at the mere mention of Kant. The technical philosophical stuff doesn’t matter. Haldane is talking about professors of philosophy, not philosophers—though, understandably, he doesn’t know well enough to make that distinction.
But he does try to bring up the difference between a philosophy that sees “matter” as primary, and a philosophy that sees something more like mind or even primordial awareness as primary. He suggests that,
A natural philosophy of such a kind would be a step in the direction of idealism. The idealists have held that the spiritual alone is the real. They have failed to account in detail for the phenomenal world on this basis, the most magnificent of such failures being Hegel’s . . . But the failure of these philosophers in detail does not prove that they were not correct in a general way. Secondary qualities, such as colour, are generally regarded as having less claim to independence of the mind than primary qualities, such as size and shape, and a working theory of the universe which started from them would certainly be a long way nearer to idealism than is present-day science. If, as Leibniz held, the universe consists wholly of minds, the transition to such a physics would only be a step in the right direction, but possibly subsequent steps might be easier. Perhaps an understanding of the psychology of social insects might help us to make them.
We should note the call for a paradigm shift in physics, one which we must acknowledge we cannot possibly understand from within the paradigm that has all of us trapped, at risk of going extinct. We should emphasize that we cannot possibly understand the kind of thinking and insight that will emerge on the other side of that shift. We simply do not know the life we will live, the universe we will inhabit, once we make this shift.
As a side note, we can also acknowledge here a recent study by Gal and Kronauer that showed how an ant colony functions like a neural network. Published under the title, “The emergence of a collective sensory response threshold in ant colonies,” the study is available through PNAS.
Before moving on, let me take back calling the above paragraph a side note. In fact, its’s a central note, related to an interesting phenomenon: We have started to recognize life here on Earth as so interesting and so little understood that we can functionally refer to it as “alien”. I have heard, for instance, popular references to the octopus as an alien intelligence here on Earth. But that holds as much for wild horses, whales, wolves, and redwood trees as it does for octopuses. We are talking about our philosophy of life here, and our need to make that philosophy more holistic, skillful, in attunement with, and conducive to, life itself.
Ignorant of the real nature of philosophy, but quite familiar with the professional philosopher of the university, Haldane expresses proper doubt that the professors of philosophy can guide us in such a shift. Nor does he seem sufficiently aware of the fact that he is talking about philosophy proper in the whole of his essay.
In other words, a physicist cannot help us shift our paradigm except in their capacity as a philosopher of science and as a central matter of philosophy in the first place. Philosophy always includes a basic vision of the Cosmos and a basic vision of human beings.
Setting that aside, Haldane’s thought here delivers for us the suggestion we must try our best to not trivialize:
I greatly doubt if they will be made by professional philosophers. And though today the theoretical physicist is and ought to be the principal type of world-builder, the biologist will one day come to his own in this respect. And one day [humans] will be able to do in reality what in this essay I have done in jest, namely, to look at existence from the point of view of non-human minds. . . Success is, indeed, impossible in view of our present ignorance of animal psychology, and that is why a purely speculative essay like the present can claim some degree of justification at this moment. Our only hope of understanding the universe is to look at it from as many different points of view as possible. This is one of the reasons why the data of the mystical consciousness can usefully supplement those of the mind in its normal state. Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.[4]
Haldane goes wrong in several ways, and they all share the same root: a confusion about the true nature of philosophy.
We most assuredly do NOT want physicists or any other scientists of the dominant culture to become the primary “world-builders”. We need wisdom here, not “knowledge,” and not mere speculation either.
Because of the unskillful path of development the dominant culture has taken, Haldane does get it right that “philosophy” lacks imagination. We have to put philosophy in quotes there because the philosophy of the dominant culture is not LoveWisdom, but a variety of ignorance. Thus, its lack of imagination appears as one symptom among many that come from the disease of conquest consciousness. In the dominant culture, philosophy does still sometimes appear as LoveWisdom, but either in fragmented or marginalized ways.
This diseased state of “philosophy” in the dominant culture may explain why many a scientist would rather reject “philosophy” altogether, and instead turn to dreaming, or—more commonly—stick with computation. But dreaming in the most vitalizing sense may not overlap much with what Haldane has in mind.
In many traditions of philosophy as a way of life, both in the dominant culture and in cultures all over the world, dreaming appears as a primary spiritual practice that guides individuals and whole communities. One could argue that the only issue we have in the west comes to perpetuating an anemic vision of philosophy, such that a holistic philosophy cannot take root and germinate, and thus cannot vitalize and empower our dream life and our dream practices, and that consequently our dream life and dream practices have no real chance of helping us realize the ideals of our best philosophies.
Dreaming is thinking in the proper sense. In resonance with the wisdom traditions, we can call this kind of thinking “nonthinking”. That may seem a strange term. It signifies that the activity we usually refer to as thinking is in fact a narrow and encumbered expression of something more wondrous and mysterious than we tend to imagine.
Dreaming, like meditation, is an art of awareness, and such arts are nonthinking—not our typical habit of cogitation, but not totally random or unthinking (i.e., we don’t become a blockhead). And they can liberate us into the ways in which Nature thinks the world into being.
Trees don’t “think” “about” “things”. Trees nonthink leaves, roots, fruits, and oxygen into being. We nonthink things into being too—like mountains, rivers, trees, leaves, birds, butterflies, and even our own bodies—however, not sensing this, we “think” abstractions that lead to more abstractions, and we think an artificial world into being, we think division into being, we think our own cut-offness into being, so that we are at odds with reality, at odds with our own ideals, at odds with each other, at odds with ourselves, and living at an ever greater virtual distance from life itself—life as we don’t yet know it. That includes the sacredness and superness of Nature and the Cosmos as a whole.
In a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, we would learn to—at minimum—treat our context as our home, and to see Nature both as natural and as sacred.
We’re touching here on what the astrobiologists think life is, how we practice life here on Earth, and how we would go about detecting life in the Cosmos. We find ourselves mostly enmeshed in ignorance, and that shapes the whole nature of our relationship to life.
We don’t treat the natural world as our home and as the broader context and activity of thinking—not merely “context” as in an inert container, but context as nondual relationality (e.g. the “nonduality of organism and environment”), such that the context does the nonthinking, not simply “with” us, but in a way in which we don’t live as if separated from it. It is a living ecology of mind, and our stand against it—the delusion of separation—amounts to taking a stand against life. LoveWisdom typically prescribes the experience of ecstasy to dispel this delusion. It’s in some ways similar to the kind of ecstasy McKenna experienced with DMT, but in other ways it goes beyond this.
Ecstasy (ec-stasy, standing outside the self, consummation of the atops) is the mystic’s experience. It’s the gift we all seek—even the astrobiologically curious.
Socrates was atopos, a being with no “place,” no label, no category, no agenda, no Cartesian coordinates. If we fit into the Cosmos itself, then no ordinary place can hold us. We don’t hide in the hovel of the ego, the fabricated life of a narrow, fearful, craving, and ignorant mind. We stop hiding behind the skin and the skull.
We’ve come full-circle, though we refined ourselves from the initial comical suggestion: not “go big or go home” so much as “go big and go home”. It’s Cosmobiology and even Cosmopsychology—the nonduality of our soul and the soul of the Cosmos, the nonduality of each of us and reality itself.
Each time we try to take sides against reality (as when we follow the dictates of “the economy” over the dictates of Psyche and Cosmos), we try forcing ourselves to be in place, to stand in place. We stand in our mind, and we don’t stand up for Love, for Life.
Ecstasy means a displacement out of habit, out of agendas, out of conquest consciousness. Our perspective gets displaced, our ignorance gets displaced, our self-centeredness gets displaced, our self-inspection gets displaced. We stop our fixed standing, our attempts to stand firm against the fluidity, openness, and radical interwovenness of reality. We stop our attempts to defend something, some imagined “territory,” and we enter the spaciousness of the dance, where no standing is possible.
The dance never stands still, even as it flows in nonduality with its own stillness. Ecstasy is still, not moving. It is still, but not fixed—like the Dance. As T.S. Eliot properly describes it (stealing from the Upanishads, the Gita, and Buddhist philosophy), nondual stillness is already movement, and nondual movement is already stillness. We enter the harmony of the Cosmos, the blissful equilibrium of the Nature of what we are.
We’re going way beyond the astrobiology of our scientists, and entering the leadership lessons of our sages. It’s the only way forward if we want to truly thrive and realize our hidden potentials. To activate our visionary LoveWisdom, we need to enter the heart of wonder, enter the mystery of what we are here and now—life as we so far don’t know it.
Entering is central, and thus initiation is essential. We are always already in the womb and being birthed. Wisdom is the womb of compassion (sunyatakarunagarbham, sunyatakarunabhinnam), and we everywhere at all times give birth to love and compassion. Moreover, we can reverse this traditional formulation and say that compassion is the womb of wisdom. We need to focus there—enter the mystery through the gateway of the heart.
We enter temples, we enter the Ways, enter the path, enter the teachings, enter the doctrines, enter the spiritual life, enter the traditions—and we verify them. We always already enter and encounter—a close encounter of the mysterious kind.
Encounter is not, “I am here and you are there and we encounter one another.” Encountering everywhere means entering everywhere, everywhere rousing, everything rousing, everything in mutual nourishment and mutual illumination. We encounter the divine everywhere, already entered into sacredness. You and I already enter one another, arise entangled with one another, your roots and shoots growing as mine, your thread of the patterning running through my loom, in total interwovenness. We enter reality through a gateless gate, because there is no gate, no entrance to reality. And yet we must enter it. We live as outsiders until we enter our own lives and loves, enter our living and loving ecologies, cross the threshold of the mystery, letting go of the known. Love is the ultimate entrance, and we cannot fully enter love without entering reality, cannot enter reality without entering love.
This entering is painful, even frightening, when we don’t engage it with open eyes and an awakened heart. I have fallen many times, hurt myself physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I have many scars. Sophia has humiliated me countless times for not entering when the gate is always already here, open. She beckons, and I—like so many humans, and like humanity en masse—have turned a deaf ear again and again.
She doesn’t want to hurt us, but when She beckons and we are distracted, hurried, mindless, afraid, graspy, tense, narrow, dazed, confused, foggy, then of our own doing we suffer. She beckons us out of our self-torture, our spinning wheel of trauma, stress, strain, worry, fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, envy, craving, desire. All the nonsense makes noise. We walk in noise, breathe noise into us, breathe noise out. We are like insane trees filling the atmosphere with toxins instead of oxygen, making suffering out of light instead of nourishing ourselves and our World. We could walk in beauty instead, and then look for beauty, recognize beauty.
We seem to think we will find “advanced” life by looking for the kind of noise we make. But maybe we need to get quiet. Maybe the most important lesson astrobiology can teach us is to sit down and shut up. Then, with a gradually quieting mind, we can begin to know life with greater intimacy and efficacy.
It may be that the most advanced forms of life in the Cosmos await this shutting up, this entrance into the heart of wonder. Maybe they can signal us in the spaciousness of a peaceful and luminous mind—perhaps in accord with the idealist paradigm shift Haldane invited us to ponder.
When we ask about life as we know it and life as we don’t know it, part of what we need to see comes to asking how we can learn to recognize the nature of mind, and that relates to learning how to recognize the mindedness all around us. We seek intelligence elsewhere, while we don’t understand intelligence right here, in ourselves and in our kin.
Frans de Waal asks a very important question that our astrobiologists—as well as all of the rest of us—need to engage with: “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” In his book by that title, de Waal shows that human beings are not always good at thinking about intelligence, and not always good at understanding and recognizing it—in part because of the ecological nature of mind.
In fact, we are often not even smart enough to fully recognize that we are animals, that animals are our kin, and that all of us arise as ecologies of mind. Moreover, we are often too ignorant to recognize the patterning of our own minds. That’s why we get trapped in addiction, suffering, trauma, war, and everything else we might classify as “samsara”. And, to say it again, we are not always good at recognizing the wisdom, love, and beauty in cultures outside our own—a problem not peculiar to conquest consciousness, but yet another problem exacerbated by it.
If we truly understood intelligence, we would all be free and happy—free from samsara, free from sin, free from the ignorance that threatens us all. Instead, we get trapped by that ignorance, and the domineering presence of that ignorance indicates that, generally speaking, we lack a sufficient understanding of intelligence.
If we were to ask the question, “Does it look like human life is organized in accord with real intelligence?” it seems we would either have to contrast intelligence with wisdom, or simply admit that, in any case, we appear kind of stupid. A profoundly intelligent species wouldn’t destroy the very conditions it depends on to survive, and it certainly wouldn’t do that for the sake of the abstraction we call “money”.
We can note here that many Indigenous peoples have found this incredibly stupid. Here, too, we have to clarify the ecological aspect of intelligence, and emphasize the fact that the dominant culture has perpetrated an unprecedented species-driven degradation of ecologies. We have limited our own intelligence, and created a culturally-sustained ecology of ignorance. How then shall we consider planetary intelligence?
If we take our ignorance into the search for life in other galaxies, we will search for a species destroying the conditions of life. We may seek a species who destroyed the conditions of life where they originated, and now themselves seek other places to degrade. Or, we may hope that they slipped through that window where the ecologies began to collapse and somehow came to their senses.
What did those intelligent beings do? Maybe they left their planet, or they found a way to build a bunch of greenhouses or harness the sun’s energy survive that way—not necessarily to create a condition of thriving, not necessarily to further the whole evolution of life on their planet, but just to survive, and maybe to continue conquest beyond their home.
Some of our most “intelligent” humans now seek what appears like the stupidest of goals: To have us leave our home, rather than develop the intelligence to live well here, and thus to develop the total intelligence of the place. One joker wants us to live in orbit. Another knucklehead wants us to go to Mars—a place with none of our friends, no birds, no grasses, no trees, no whales.
Do we really know what our own intelligence is? Do we recognize the mind that’s all around us? Do we recognize that we live in, through, and as interwoven ecologies of mind? How does intelligence manifest in ecologies of mind—not just one thing? And what would all of this say about the presence of planetary intention?
We see that, in each instance where we want to say, “That’s one thing,” we’re pointing already at an ecology, at a whole network of relationality. We don’t get that yet, because we think so-and-so is smart, and we don’t say, “This ecology produced some creative or insightful activity that was valuable to the whole.” We don’t even recognize clearly enough the ways our relationships with our mothers affect our IQ—which, again, doesn’t function as the best measure of a truly useful notion of intelligence, but doesn’t mean nothing.
What do we imagine a very intelligent being would expect to see if it were recognizing true intelligence? What would an unfathomably advanced culture think a true leader would be competent at? What would an unfathomably advanced culture think a true leader would be like?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but it seems our wisdom traditions offer us the best way to find out, for they teach us how to cultivate the kind of skillful mind we should—on ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological grounds—think of as belonging to the most admirable leaders and the most accomplished human beings. They give us the best guidance for seeing the true nature of self and reality, and for understanding and eventually wonderstanding the profound and subtle interwovenness and fluidity of life.
As far as we can tell, the most advanced forms of human life—holistically considered—depend on, and presence, this more skillful mind. At this point, so does life in general.
And if we want visionary leaders in the most robust and life-enhancing sense—genuinely wise leaders, genuinely compassionate and beautiful leaders who have found true peace in themselves and can creatively increase the levels of peace, understanding, and well-being in the world we share, leaders who intimately know the subtle and profound interwovenness and fluidity of life, and who know how to cultivate the whole of life onward—then we need to tend both the spiritual and ecological commons that constitute the context and the interwoven activity of planetary intelligence. We have to liberate ourselves into these larger ecologies of mind, and listen to the alien life right here—until we recognize it as ourselves, recognize these beings as our kin, recognize the whole miracle as the image of the divine, and realize our true home.
When we accomplish this, the laughter will ring out so resoundingly that the most profoundly and magnificently intelligent beings from across the Cosmos will sense it, and reach out in mutual recognition. It’s a laugh worth seeking.
[1] Read the full talk here: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/rap-dancing-into-the-third-millennium
Listen to the full talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adDRsqEj4PU
[2] https://www.organism.earth/library/document/a-weekend-with-terence-mckenna
[3] https://www.organism.earth/library/document/rap-dancing-into-the-third-millennium
[4] http://jbshaldane.org/books/1927-Possible-Worlds/haldane-1927-possible-worlds.html#start