The most important work in the society, which is the caring and the nurturing work of the society, has been relegated to the inferior group: you know, to women. And then we wonder why we can’t have social priorities that are more caring if those very people are excluded from power, right?
What I’d like to suggest is that we look at technology as something that is really a human function, a human capacity. From day one, language is a technology of communication, isn’t it? The stick that even chimpanzees use to help them dig up plants and what have you—that’s a technology. It’s a tool. Our tool-making capacity is really an extension of natural functions. I mean, an airplane does something that a bird does, but we’ve built it. So I look at technology neither as the villain or as the savior.
What we have going for us is that the partnership way of thinking is really scripted into the bones of the planet. This is how it’s always been done. This is how nature does it. The Darwinian model of nature that we’ve inherited from the nineteenth century is simply another dominator fiction used to reinforce dominator mechanisms. The fact is that what nature really maximizes is cooperation, integration, and mutuality of support and relationship.
What we have to do is see more deeply into the context of being and the situation in which we find ourselves, and to see that we are of it. It’s a seamless web. The dynamics that rule the biological and natural world are the dynamics that are going to work for us. We didn’t fall here out of the sky. We weren’t made by a jealous God who set us loose in a kind of reservation. We are of the stuff of this place, and its dynamics can be our dynamics. The problem is one of awareness, realization, recovery of this perception, sharing it, revivifying it, and realizing it. That’s all.
What is going to be emerging, I hope, is a whole new economic model where we put in central value the caring work. That has traditionally, of course, been relegated to women and to so-called effeminate men. And we have that opportunity now, as we move from industrial to post-industrial society, because we have to redefine what is productive work.
Nature and spirituality are related. Perhaps we can speak about it as the ecstatic experience; the experience of gnosis.
When you look at us, we clearly play an unusual evolutionary role. We are some kind of trigger species for mode shifts that affect the entire planet.
What is Gaia? Gaia is the set of integrated informational control systems which regulate and maintain and stabilize all life and all biological processes on this planet. And the way this is done is through chemical messengers, enzymes, stimulants, depressants, enhancers. All of these things push and pull on the morphogenetic field in which everything on the planet is bound.
To me, the great miracle on this planet is us. We are the great unlikelihood. If this planet were as it was even five million years ago, Darwinian mechanics (properly modified) would be sufficient to account for what was present: natural ecosystems, animals in competitive and adaptive relationship. But we really are as alien as an alien spacecraft would be. We are the great imponderable here. And I think that nature is at play with itself, and is calling out of the primates a gene swarm that is in self-reflection of what is otherwise a planetary intent. And that’s why we feel why our hearts are so open to these ineffable emotions about destiny and transformation.
What do we need? We need a leader that can inspire other people to work together in teams.
There are societies that seem to have a more equitable arrangement. And it always seems to involve a larger social grouping than the family.
One notion is that nature is a competition of tooth and claw, and that the swiftest, the fiercest, the meanest will always come out on top. This is just a notion that was attractive to a Victorian gentleman who happened to be in charge of a world-screwing empire at the time. Any modern biologist will tell you that what is being maximized in biological systems is cooperation, integration, mutual reinforcement and mutual meeting of need. Obviously, if an organism can insinuate itself into the energy loop of another organism, it will have more of its own energy to play with. And this is the strategy that is operating.
How did language (as we know it and as I am using it at this moment) come to be? Must this not have been something which was for thousands and thousands of years just under the surface of our ability to take hold of it and cognize? And then suddenly it gelled. There was a phase transition, and people got the idea that you could signify with sound; that you could cause an image of a thing not present to come into the mind of your hearer by naming it. And this is a tremendous, almost a miraculous ability.
The miracle of human language, the things that we can do, the way that poetry can set armies marching, and the way Messiahs take control of the destiny of whole millennia of people—it’s all through the spoken word. It’s all through the power of images beheld in the privacy of the individual mind, somehow linked to little mouth noises.
These little mouth noises go across space and enter through the ear of the hearer, the hearer consults his or her dictionary, and reconstructs a blueprint of the intended thought. And this very crude process is what holds us together; our religions, our governments, our hopes, our fears. So a transformation in the linguistic domain would create a great cohesion.
The octopus may contain the hint of what this great phase transition we’re approaching is to be. It is actually, I think, an effort to turn ourselves inside out; to objectify the mind so that it can be beheld and freely seen, so that we can each see the soul of the other, and then to interiorize the body so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination.
