Thanks Sentient for your thoughtful responses.
I watched your posted John Hagelin discussion on Unified Field and, truth be told, it just didn’t resonate with me. Maybe I’m in a reductive kind-of-place right now - and hence the dismantling of my beliefs down to what I believe is their animistic core - so I’m hesitant to layer explanatory structures on top of the foundation. And there’s a part of me that feels like Hagelin ultimately amounts to a distraction - probably the same part that responds to scientific cosmology with an eye-rolling “okay, so what? So we came from a Big Bang, so the universe is going to crunch, or metric expansion itself into nothingness, how does this inform us in Middle Space, grappling with finding meaning in our lives and searching for functional truths?”.
I believe that animism, at least as extended to living beings, is essentially self-evident (and would love to hear if anyone feels to the contrary). I’m still working on the moral guidance that might derive from this claim (e.g. you can believe the squirrel is a person, but does it necessarily follow that you shouldn’t kill that person?). As a vegan to me the answer is pretty clear, but I’d like to subject that to at least some kind of logical exploration.
Your mention of the “World Pole” with the Eagle on top makes me think of Norse Mythology’s Yggdrasil, spanning the nine worlds, with an eagle at the top and the serpent Nidhogg gnawing on the roots underneath. Most charming to me is Ratatoskr, the squirrel that runs between the two, carrying gossip and insults from one to another. In my opinion there should definitely be more books out there about this squirrel
Finally, in your first response you said “when you experience the energy or the auric radiance of a tree (within yourself) - you will know its ‘heart’.” There’s a lot here to unpack and I’m a bit vague on what is actually meant by “auric radiance” or “energy”. I’d be hesitant to suppose that anyone could know the tree’s “heart”. Especially for that matter that we don’t even understand our own selves.
Take, for example, patients with brain hemispheral separation or trauma. My understanding of the current state of neurophysical/behavioral research is that when tested these patients can express two totally contradictory opinions or choices, one coming from each hemisphere. For example, the left hemisphere answers that apple is the subject’s favorite fruit, and the right hemisphere answers orange. The dawning sense, apparently, is that there may be MANY seats of conscious agency within our own brains, and perhaps something is acting as “executive decider” to corral these voices into a final answer which, wrongly, we all perceive as one-and-only-one answer that came from the tiny person sitting behind our eyes operating our gears and levers.
My point here is that we do not understand ourselves.
Isn’t it entirely possible that we cannot understand a tree? No matter how much we hug it?
Isn’t that the humble, respectful position to take?
Best regards and Happy Sunday,
Northern Seeker