I want to pick up where I left off in Part One.
Because after I wrote that last piece, something nagged at me.
The diagnosis is clear.
Object thinking and the string of other phrases we use to define the place humanity finds itself in has brought us to the edge of ecological collapse.
What we don’t have is a clear account of what to do about it.
And I want to be careful here, because the obvious move is to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and come to a wrong conclusion.
I’m not making any anti-technology argument. That’s far too easy, and keeps us locked in to surface level thinking (knee-jerking).
Instead we need to probe deeper.
The tools are not the problem. The problem is the way of seeing that produced them.
If I’m standing in a woodland and all I can see is cubic metres of timber, better satellite imagery changes nothing.
The view is still the same.
Technology built on object thinking keeps producing object thinking.
More distance from the actual living world in front of you.
The ecological crisis we are in is not asking for better object-thinking tech.
What it is asking is a fundamental change in how we experience the world.
New methods and new tools can follow the shift in perception.
But experiencing must come first.
Science matters. Evidence matters. The analytical mind is remarkable.
It’s vitally important, but it gets out of balance when object-thinking becomes the only, dominant way to experience the world.
The analytical mind is not the only instrument available to us, and we have made a huge mistake believing it is.
Our sensing bodies know things our intellects don’t.
Intuition carries real information.
Sustained, still, felt-sense attention reveals things analysis alone cannot fathom.
If you sit with a plant for an hour, just to be present with it, nothing else, something shifts in these moments.
Not all the time, but enough times that, for me, I cannot dismiss it.
It’s not woo or mysticism, it’s grounded experience in the here-and-now in the body.
This is what Domei teaches.
The core of the practice is dynamic listening.
A felt, immersive, visceral way to experience the world.
A way to attend to the rest of the living world, slowly, without agenda, in a way that allows genuine relationship where before there was simply abstraction.
It is not anti-science. This goes beyond either/or and encourages both/and.
It’s what becomes possible when you stop treating the world as an object and start, however clumsily, to treat it as a presence.
A deep, entangled aliveness.
Something loosens in those moments of attention.
A brief sense that the boundary between me and the rest of the living world is more permeable than I’d assumed.
You and other, person and plant, human and river.
But this cultural narrative we have been handed, that our individuality makes us fundamental separate from the rest of creation.
That is a story someone else told us, and we accepted it without testing it.
Discernment is our most valuable asset.
Believe nothing, test everything.
Stop putting other humans on a pedestal believing some of them have deeper insight than yourself.
Stop seeking the profound and realise it has always been here.
That is one of the biggest cons of empire. That you, you lovely human, need the masters to figure life out for you.
Life, and how to flourish and thrive, is genetically hard-wired into you.
It’s a biological reality.
Empire just told you otherwise. And worse, told you to not trust the sensuous, sensual, signal receiving body you inhabit.
I am not asking you to agree with any of this.
I simply ask you to test my unruly ideas, and validate them in your own life.
Either they will get validated or they won’t, and you won’t know unless you try some of the practices I suggest.
The world is already in relationship with you, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
The question is whether you are prepared to explore a new way of seeing and being.
Ultimately that is up to you.