Heroes Not Zombies

We don’t live in a world of entirely separate, fixed objects.

We live in a massively interconnected world of flow.

Every living organism is an open system. There is a continuous flow of materials, energy and information into, through, and from every animal, every plant, every ecosystem.

Yet, we continue to swallow the idea of reductionism, which tells us everything is made up of separate, smaller parts, and the way to understand anything is to isolate parts and observe them as if they aren’t connected to anything else. It’s useful to focus closely on something. It’s useful to analyse something and consider it at various different levels, but it’s dangerous and delusional to fail to see that everything is always in a state of flow…..affected by, and affecting, other organisms, by the environment and by the multiple contexts of its existence.

And we continue to be taken in by dualism….the belief that there are objects and subjects….objects which are measurable and “real”, and subjects which are individual and “imaginary”. I’m not going to get into the complexities of the “hard question” here….of how consciousness can emerge from “stuff”….but this dualism leads us to deny or dismiss human experience, when, actually, experience is THE fundamental characteristic of reality.

We are not machines. We are not machine like. We are living creatures, every one of us with a continuous, ever flowing, experience of consciousness. A consciousness which enables us to appreciate beauty, truth and goodness. A consciousness which enables us to be aware and to direct our attention to whatever interests us, whatever moves us, whatever makes us wonder.

When I look at this photo, I see “flow”. I see it represented in the water. I see it represented in the wood. I see it represented in the green plants. I see it everywhere.