Theo Eshetu – Ode to Courage

Dare we evoke a form of plant brain?

There is no creator. Creation itself is enough unto itself. It needs no outside agency.

We’ve been separated from nature since the very beginnings of Western mythology. What we’ve lost is the beauty of the world and we make up for it with attempting to conquer the world or own the world. The human being is on the planet in order to appreciate it, that’s all.

You know, there is an interesting story in the Bible. It’s called Genesis, and in that story, God creates a planet, God creates nature, and as an afterthought, more or less, God created people and put them into that mix. The unfortunate part of that story that’s been carried around for the last couple of thousand years makes a situation that suggests that we and nature are separated from one another. This has been a big problem, you know why? Because we were actually created by nature.

It’s such an amazing understanding to think that the “it”, which made fleas and mountains, rivers and stars, made me. What I pray for is humility, to know that there is something greater than I.

What people call “natural” in our Western tradition is in fact our projection of concepts upon the world. The natural is our tendency to project our notions and concepts upon the outer world, to see the outer world not as the immediate datum of experience, but as an embodied label, as the illustration of some generalization already pre-existing in our skulls. This is what we call the natural world. The supernatural world, as far as I’m concerned, is in effect the genuinely natural world, which is the world of immediate experience without all these concepts imposed upon it.

I walk in the woods, and that’s my church. So, I’m not bound by having to go to this one little building to pray and to speak to my creator. I do that here.

We’ve made nature the other, we’ve created this dualistic system that serves nobody. And by separating it, we removed the direct connection with nature.

The significance is, as the fate of nature goes, so does the fate of human civilization.

If you were to look at human skin under an electron microscope, you would not be able to tell where the human being begins and ends. There is no fine barrier between the person and the universe. There is just a flow from one to the next, and the only reason we perceive separateness is because of the limitations of our senses.

No reason why it stops from humans to animals and does not continue on into other life forms including plants. In fact, I don’t think you would find a serious researcher of consciousness who would completely exclude the idea that plants themselves are not conscious.

The human neurobiology world wants you to believe that consciousness is something that is completely relegated to the brain. But we know that there’s multiple theories of consciousness, and so the other side of the debate says: “No, plants are conscious, because they are aware of themselves, they can take in multiple pieces of input and then make decisions on that input”. In other worlds, adapt or accept or transform or chance based on what’s happening.

The problem is not the plants communicating with us. The problem is human beings listening to the plants. Because once we start to recognize plants as persons, with personality, our entire world changes.

We have underestimated the relevance and importance of the way plants function. Plants don’t have brains, they don’t have a nervous system, but we now understand that there might be an intelligence that sits outside the brain.

Cognition can happen without the brain, and this is science. So, when we are met with a fact, with evidence, with data, that show that something is not quite right to your theory, all you need is to revise the theory.

We’re the ones who are supposed to learn how to live in harmony with the garden. A garden is not a battleground. But look what we did: we’ve turned it into a battleground. A garden is the height of cooperation. This is what nature is asking humans to do at this moment: start learning to live in harmony and cooperation.