Friday, February 14, 2014

Nature's wisdom

Some people think that, of all the living things on Earth, humans are the highest-evolved and most important. I beg to differ. Why are we even comparing? All life is connected. We're ALL important - people, other animals, plants, microbes. And we all (all living things) work together to create the ecosystem which keeps us all alive.

All life is conscious. There is reason to believe the Earth of which we are a part is alive. There is even reason - good, scientific, logical reason - to conclude that the whole Universe is alive.

I can back up with evidence these wild statements. And here's another wild one for you: Our species is not really that smart in the big picture of things; we just have big heads.

Think we invented needles? Mosquitoes and bitey-flies were way ahead of us. Think we invented the internet? Sorry, but the underground communication of the fungi community is more complex and came before this human communication system. Think our big brains make us smarter? Some other animals have bigger brains than us. And why assume the brain is the seat of intelligence? A butterfly can smell a flower's nectar a half mile away; can you? Plants and non-human animals communicate via ultraviolet and infrared frequencies we're not aware of without instrumentation. Elephants hear and speak via infrasound; we can't even hear infrasound. We figured out how to make velcro and similar materials from flies and geckos and other animals; that's what allows some of them to walk up walls. Spiders spin silk many times the strength of steel. Think plants are dumbbells? Plants protect themselves by producing chemicals to sicken the animals that eat them. Plants respond to attacks by changing their growth and flowering patterns. We call people dumb by referring to them as "birdbrains", but there are thousands of stories of birds displaying individual personalities, social skills, and so-called "human" attributes such as compassion, cooperation, jealousy, revenge, and nurturing. Non-human animals have long term memories, the capacity to reason, and often skills we humans don't have. Some birds orient themselves via the incredible complexity of stars. Non-human animals fight but also cooperate with other species, and make moment-to-moment decisions based not on instinct but on the situation at hand.

It is being borne out in laboratories and elsewhere that non-human animals, plants, and even microbes are in constant electromagnetic relationship with others, including us. You can call that unconscious interspecies communication or even extrasensory perception, but all life has it.

There is a long history of human discoveries about the natural world that boggle the mind. Our proper attitude should be awe. We are waking up to life all around us and in the rest of the Universe. And, through quantum physics and the recognition that science and spirituality are talking about the same thing, we are finding we ourselves are connected to the life in the rest of the Universe.

Each kind of life has unique abilities. And we humans don't have the corner on wisdom, either.

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