As I’ve grown older, I’ve become deeply suspicious of people touting intellectual knowledge that isn’t complimented with direct lived experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-intellectual per se. I read philosophical waffle myself, and enjoy it.
But concepts and explanations are only useful when used to reflect on your personal experiences. They become problematic the moment they start replacing them.
‘Trust yourself’, the fairy said.
The status quo feeds us ideas all the time. Unfortunately, most people do not validate them in their own lives.
Authority operates through status. When people are perceived as high-status, others usually accept what they say instead of holding it provisionally until they can validate what is said for themselves.
Once upon a time there was a concept that went like this: ‘What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.’
If you read, watch, or listen to nothing but New Age voices for a week, excluding other viewpoints, you’ll begin to see the world through a New Age lens. This shift will change how you experience things, as your perspective adapts to that framing.
Similarly, if you read, watch, or listen to atheist voices for a week, you might, by the end of it, start seeing the world as an atheist does.
All beliefs—essentially just intellectual waffle—act as a reality tunnel. They capture what the thinker believes the prover proves.
I have often seen people in my courses arrive full to the brim with facts. They know all the Latin names, the constituents, and how a plant has been traditionally used, among other details.
Now there is nothing wrong with that. I am, after all, an ethnobotanical researcher, and my head is full of a myriad of facts.
I’m also under no illusion that a stuffed head does not equate to knowing a plant in a relational way.
Intellectual brain fodder has its limits when it comes to developing kinship with the living world.
Brain knowledge puts a glass etched with ideas, beliefs, and assumptions between us and the plant.
We may know everything about yarrow. We might read all the books on yarrow, and in social company we can appear clever — status-seeking — by trotting out our litany of accumulated facts.
People somehow think that by accumulating data, they have developed a relationship with plants.
In herbal medicine, these fact-gatherers and regurgitators are called brown bottle herbalists. Sure, they have a qualification; they most certainly don’t have a relationship.
I have taught a lot of these folks. They usually arrive frustrated and sad that, after years of study, they often never met the living plant they ended up dispensing.
Luckily, that’s changing. However, I think our focus on brain knowledge over deeper body experience is why we’re in this situation today.
Once you start substituting the description for a thing, often described by other people rather than yourself, you stop seeing it and see that description instead.
If someone has read a bucketload of foraging books but never eaten a single plant from a hedgerow, that person is not a forager. They might think they are, but they are not. What they are is a reader.
In this essay, I am trying to focus the lens on the importance of experience: real-world boots-on-the-ground and bum-in-the-hedge lived experience. That must, it really must, start to complement head stuffing.
This is why Domei is a practice-first, practice-led approach.
You do not need a head full of understanding, nor do you need to believe anything; you simply need to find a plant and spend time with it.
I’ll finish with this: reading about plants is like reading about swimming before you have ever gone in the water.
At some point you’re going to have to get wet, and that is when your real education begins.