Sorting Reality from Ideas

We live in a culture where some segments truly believe (or at least act like) preferences and feelings have some kind of sacred status – where the more villainizing, stomping, protesting, and loudly signaling our outrage, the more legitimate our argument is. As if our personal passion were a suitable substitute for substance – as if spouting off with vein popping force somehow makes the argument more credible. Some of us apparently lack depth perception to see beyond ourselves, and as a consequence, we project our arrogant ignorance along with our fears, suspicions, hopes and emotions on to public figures, associates as well as cultural icons of every stripe, dead or alive. We live in a universe whose boundaries extend to the outskirts of our own ignorance. We then mistake our ghostly projections for reality, not knowing the vomited echo of our ignorant self indulgence blowing back on us is not an accurate picture of the social landscape. What we see as reality is actually composed of reflections from the hall of distorted mirrors in which we live and breathe.

Unless we make the investment to exit the shadowy cave of our own self importance to embrace the wider social reality , we will continue to falsely assert our sanctity and suffer the frustrated experience that is spawned from that reactionary prison. Unless we embrace a reality that recognizes we coexist and attempt to forge a climate of respect and dignity at the same time we also defend against real antagonisms that can destroy us, we will become a fountain of frustration spewing maligning scorn and incessant tantrums toward any perspective other than our own. Even worse, through the destructive force of our self importance spawning a reactionary climate, we will conjure up the very demons that consume us. We will bathe in the toxic bile we made out of this false idea that we alone have the one true bead on how we all should think and behave…

In the dim glow of our ignorance we can miss the profound hypocrisy and irony of our stance. Our ignorance will also protect us from an awareness of our powerful contribution to the disintegration of the foundation on which we all stand. This also means that when the destruction of our own making comes to fruition, we will be ignorant of its source much less its resolution or prevention. We will continue to live in a wordy world of self righteous blame and impotence like any fundamentalist – baying at the moon with the expectation that it should bow to our cries and change its course.

A cat is natively wired to be suspicious of being attacked from anything outside its very small trusted comfort zone. This is not because of how the world actually is, it is because the cat sees the world through its own self induced lens. It thinks of how it would behave and projects that motive on to the outside world, and then bathes in the experience of life that is generated from that place… And this, by the way, is the very nature of the spectrum of mental illness that spans from neurosis to psychosis.

The Relationship Economy Expressed through Nature

The relationships that are woven into the fabric of nature stretch across a spectrum from predatory and parasitic all the way to mutually beneficial, and in some cases the relationship can become necessary. (Obligate) The common thread throughout the biological relationship economy is that the relationships that take root and survive over time either provide a benefit in terms of what was necessary at some point to survive and propagate in the context of the environment, or at least those that do not prevent survival from happening.

When we consider how relationships emerge in this context we can see that thin times would be inclined to produce behaviors where higher risk in exchange for nutrition would be part of the process, bringing about relationships at the parasitic and predatory end of the spectrum. More fruitful times would incline a more mutually beneficial relationship economy to develop – one that improves the adaptive strength of the whole relationship community. This range of behaviors that emerges in the context of environmental cues over time can then become ingrained as the adaptive strategy until and unless this strategy becomes a selective disadvantage, in which case there will either be a behavior change, or extinction. The behaviors that emerge over time develop multiple levels of complexity because of fluctuations in the availability of nutrients and climate conditions etc. In this climate pockets of mutually beneficial behaviors such as organs in a body can exist inside a predatory organism which also needs to hunt and kill other organisms as a predator in order to feed.

The link below illustrates an example of a mutually beneficial relationship that developed between fruit bearing trees and elephants, where the elephant gets fruit in exchange for spreading the seed of the tree and producing a “fertilizer” package in which to plant it. This relationship strengthens the adaptive advantage for both organisms, making them in effect part of a singular relationship climate – interdependent. The tapestry of relationships expressed through nature communicates what is possible in climates of cultivation vs. those of domination as well as how the spectrum of relationships shape what a given organism will experience as life.

It is significant to note that we humans have the capacity to shape the environment. We are not simply destined to react. We can participate. If we leverage this ability effectively, we can shape our experience by shaping the relationship economy in which we exist to be mre inclined to produce “fruitful” relationships.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/amazing-african-elephants-may-transport-seeds-farther-any-other-land-animal