Perceptual Intelligence

The heartbreaking pictures of the devastation in Ukraine, can be seen as the world body wounded and broken. The ugliness of the destruction testifies to what Alan Watts once said. “Morality is the aesthetics of behavior.” We recoil as the harmony of a functioning society is being wantonly destroyed. The outbreaks of violence all over the world are grown out of a pathological model of realty that sees reality as a machine where everything is stuff that can be possessed and exploited. Not caring about the history or the people, lives are destroyed for access to resources. This attitude of seeing the planet as a giant pool of raw material to use up interferes with the balance of the all-inclusive organism of the planet. The disconnection and imbalance reflects a psychological imbalance grown from an alienated worldview. Chief Seattle said, “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth”. Organic intelligence is alert to the health of the whole. Since everything is part of an intricate network of interrelated systems, staying aware of the totality is necessary to moving in harmony with the flow of being that’s happening all around us. This comes naturally if the underlying model of the universe includes us as part of an organic whole. If we’re disrupting other aspects of the overall system we’re like a cancer, growing without heed of the damage and pain we cause, sucking up vital resources without regard to the host. Much of what divides us and keeps us from acting together is imagery that places us outside of things, casting us as the one that tinkers with the machine. This is the same image as religion’s large-scale Maker, which also puts the traditional God outside of us. It is more sensible to think of ourselves as growing from the planet like all of nature, not made by something external. The Gaia Hypothesis came out decades ago. James Lovelock’s conception was of a self-regulating quality in the earth itself. Just like the adjustments made in our own body, it responds to imbalances. This universal motion of homeostasis exists on every level and in every system, adapting to change to restore equilibrium. Persisting in the belief in man’s dominion over the earth may lead to the earth itself wiping out the source of destruction, us. The materialistic world of separate things has resisted seeing our interconnectedness because it’s a threat to a competitive attitude. Accumulating and controlling more of the planet does not serve the good of the whole. The narrow sight lines of a competitive stance focus on the end result and miss many of the consequences of that single-mindedness. This is where looking at art can help. Art puts the emphasis on the whole and what it expresses. It tunes attention to the big picture, so important to a cooperative attitude that sees relationships in the specific contexts and not categories and labels. Collectively, our different perspectives offer more choices and possibilities for solving the serious problems that we should be facing together. Putting the many ideas of the group in service to the world body is a collective effort that could revolutionize the way we live together.