Oneness is hard

Stretch out in the park and feel the breeze filling your lungs. Traces of you whisk downwind. The oxygen exhaled by nearby plants blows into your body, microbial life visiting with each inhalation. Tiny motes of yourself, sloughed off skin cells, pheromones, take flight into the world - little adventurous messengers. Isn't that fun?

I like the sense of profound connection, feeling my oneness with plants, birds, soil and sky. But oneness is oneness. It includes cough germs, the dog poo, and the carcass of a shopping trolley exposed on the riverbank. That is less nice, and I resist it. But what I resist most is accepting my oneness with other people.

Not, particularly, my family or friends. The really hard challenge is people whose actions or opinions I find intolerable. I'm not going to give examples of such actions and opinions: the things that I find intolerable may be different from those you find intolerable. The issue is not the specifics of what we each find intolerable, it's that we respond by dividing the great oneness of the world, denying our connection with the intolerable. But the intolerable is still there.

I think this dividing up of the world is at the root of how conflict of opinion spills over into violence and war.  Once the intolerable is experienced as entirely separate from ourselves, then eliminating it becomes a potentially tempting option. We might start with persuasion, or coercion, but violence and annihilation have become options too.

So as a tiny contribution to making my part of the world more peaceful and more war-resistant, I seek to extend my oneness and acknowledge uncomfortable connection. My exercise is to first feel my continuity with the world and how other people are also part of that great continuity. Then I choose some person or behaviour from which I would like to disconnect and I try to reconnect them as part of my extended mind-body: the world.

That's it. If you try it, please let me know what you experienced below. I don't think we need to love everyone, or even forgive them, and I don't think we need to somehow permit all behaviours. But just to remember that although we play particular parts, we aren't directing the whole universe.

You can oppose both people and beliefs without casting them out of your world. We are all just infinitesimal microdots interconnected with a billion billion other parts of this enormous world. Remember how small everyone is, and release the assumption that either you or anyone else can possibly know the whole of what, if anything, is truly 'right' on the scale of the universe.

I think it makes a difference. Not always, and not immediately. But it can allow flexibility back into a stalemate, grow new paths from dead ends, offer breathing space when the pressure's building. It's not as much fun as visualising sunlight and oxygen exchanges, but it might help protect the park if, someday in the future, something we disagree on threatens to erupt into open conflict.

Don't believe in humans

What is a human? The body I call ‘me’ when I'm shopping for clothes is in reality a mobile ecosystem composed of interdependent cells of many species, few of which are human in any sense. If I were a democracy, then cells with human DNA would not be in government, just a fringe group on the back benches. 

The exact population of this ecosystem-self affects and is affected by the environment it moves through - exchanging membership all the time. On top of that, each cell, whether genetically human or not, is permeable to the mineral world: atoms and molecules continually flow across boundaries, replacing parts of the structure. Importantly, this replacement is not always exactly like for like - metabolic processes use what is available. 

So should our self retreat to the mind - have a little human ‘me’ in charge, driving the little bit of ecosystem that is a 'human' body? Not really. Increasing evidence shows non-human agents, including our own gut bacteria, affecting our minds, our mood and our priorities, as well as our energy levels. If we are in the driving seat, then our 'passengers' are a crowd of map reading backseat drivers who sometimes actually wrest control of the wheel - although we will usually still experience it as ourselves doing the driving.

Can we then expand the 'me' to include all contributors to the driving: our whole local ecosystem of animal, vegetable and mineral? I think we should, but we don't. We keep a clear distinction between ourselves as human, and the rest of nature. That is what 'human' really means - our sense of ourselves as separable from the world.

At least in English, this distinction is embedded in phrases such as ‘getting out into nature’ on the weekend, as if our our own homes and streets were something else. But our homes are the nests of homo sapiens, and our cities no less natural than a stretch savannah with termite mounds, or virgin rainforest containing orang nests. 

This idea of ourselves as somehow separable from the natural world is dangerous because it disconnects us. It gives an entirely illusory sense of freedom and power where the world we inhabit seems just one of our possessions. The world is not a possession, not something we can choose to exploit or to care for. It is something we are.  

In reality, our skin is no absolute boundary, merely a national border, with constant traffic across. We are utterly knit into the universe, not just walking through it. We are not humans, we are the local world - tiny fragments of conscious nature, utterly continuous with the physical and abstract worlds. 

Believe in the world around you, believe in your experience, believe in your connectedness. But don't believe in humans, they are mythical beings abstracted from the world. And since the world is entirely connected, they don't exist.

The first note

Starling notebook gathers different perspectives on nature, philosophy and art with a view to better understanding what the good life is, and how to have one.

I picked the name to invoke the emergent coherence of a murmuration - that amazing composite which sometimes dances in our winter skies: thousands of individual starlings swooping and twisting in unison. I have a feeling that many ideas about wilderness, beauty and meaning are deeply connected and I am trusting this faint intuition will come into focus as these notes gather. 

Murmurating starlings are constantly interacting with their fellows and similarly I am choosing to blog these thoughts monthly in the hope of comments and feedback from any readers flying a similar path.