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Reconnecting with the More-Than-Human World

Human and Nonhuman Nature

We are part of nature. We could not exist without the earth, the sun, our galaxy, and the whole cosmos. The history of our galaxy reaches back billions of years and is grounded in the evolution of the universe.

We are also aware of our separation from the rest of nature. There is a distinction between the human world—our social and economic environment, the languages and cultures we inherit, the houses and cities we live in, the computer screens we interact with, the vehicles we travel in—and the rest of nature. Clearly there is vastly more nonhuman nature than humanized nature in the universe, including billions of galaxies beyond our own.

We are not alone in making a distinction between our own species and the rest of nature. If only for purposes of breeding, members of other animal species have to recognize each other. A peahen has to be able to recognize a peacock, even though he differs in appearance from her, in order to mate. And social animals, like ants in their nests or wolves in their packs, recognize and interact intensely with other members of their groups. The group itself has a boundary that separates it from the rest of the world, though it interacts continually with its environment. There is an implicit distinction between the group and the wider world on which it depends.

An illuminating way of thinking of nonhuman nature is in terms of the more-than-human world, a phrase introduced in the 1990s by the cultural ecologist David Abram.¹ It is only because of the more-than-human world of the earth, the solar system, and the entire cosmos that we are here.

Unfortunately, many of us have acquired a habit of thinking of the rest of the natural world as somehow less than human. Galaxies, planets, biological species, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles are all mapped out in our scientific theories. We seem to see nature from the outside, as if we are disembodied minds. In schools, children learn about the solar system from books and models, without going out at night to look at the actual planets and constellations. In kindergarten, young children may interact with living animals and plants, but as they grow up, the study of biology becomes increasingly removed from experience. It soon leaves actual animals and plants behind and centers on textbook diagrams of physical and chemical mechanisms, representations of DNA molecules, brain scans, and computer simulations.

The scientific models seem more important than the living organisms themselves. And since these models depend on physical processes that can be modeled mathematically, soon mathematics seems like the ultimate reality. Living nature is replaced by mental abstractions, found only in minds or in computer software. In fact, an understanding of these mathematical models exists only in a tiny minority of human minds belonging to mathematicians, mathematically trained scientists, and computer programmers.

Yet for many of us, a sense of direct connection with the more-than-­human world is of vast importance and helps to inspire us spiritually.

Everyday Connections

Our species, Homo sapiens, is thought to be about a hundred thousand years old and is descended from previous hominin species going back several million years to an ancestor we shared with apes. For the vast majority of hominin history, our ancestors lived in groups and sustained themselves by gathering plants and sometimes eating other animals. They were hunter-gatherers.

Hunter-gatherers take it as given that the world around them is alive: the animals and plants, the earth, the heavens, the sun and the moon, the rivers, the sea, the winds, and the weather. They are animists. Their mythologies emphasize the life and interconnectedness of the natural world, a continual dialogue of souls between humans and nonhumans.²

Amerindian mythologies presuppose that there was an original spiritual unity, a primal human being, from which all things are derived. Humans do not come from animals; instead, animals come from human-like beings. The South American anthropologist Viveiros de Castro points out that this traditional view is in many ways the opposite of ours. We see human nature as originally animal, and human culture controls our animal nature. Having been animals, we remain animals “at bottom.” By contrast, “Amerindian thought holds that, having been human, animals must still be human, albeit in an unapparent way.” The inner nature of all animals is like ours, but their bodies have nonhuman forms.

The myths of the Campa people of the Peruvian Andes tell how the primal Campa people became irreversibly transformed into the various species of plants and animals. The development of the universe was primarily a process of diversification, and humankind was the primal substance from which all things arose. The present-day Campa people are descendants of the ancestral Campa, but only the ones who escaped being transformed.³

By contrast, from the materialist point of view, the entire cosmos is unconscious, with no purpose or meaning. Biological species are genetically programmed machines. We humans have emerged as a result of blind physical processes. Solar systems, planets, animals, and plants are mindless mechanisms impelled by physical and chemical forces. Any attempt to see mind, soul, psyche, or purpose in nonhuman nature is nothing but a projection of human minds onto the rest of the world, found in primitive and religious people and children. Secular, modern, scientifically educated, progressive people have grown out of it. Or at least, they should have grown out of it.

These different worldviews lead to very different relationships with the rest of nature. If nature is unconscious and mechanistic, as the materialist philosophy assumes, then our scientific understanding is the supreme conscious reality. Our subjective experiences are by-products of the activity of brains.

But according to the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, himself a secular humanist, it is a mistake to erect a barrier between our subjective experiences and the natural world. Wilson thinks humans have an instinctive need to connect with animals and plants, based on a long evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers. He calls this instinctive love of nature “biophilia,” from the Greek bios (life) and philia (love of). Inherited biophilia underlies “the connections that human beings subconsciously seek with the rest of life.”⁴

Even in modern industrial civilizations, many people experience a conscious connection with nonhuman nature. Many have felt that they have been in contact with a greater presence, mind, being, spiritual reality, or God.

For our ancestors—thousands of generations of hunter-gatherers and many generations of farmers—daily connections with animals, plants, landscapes, and weather were essential aspects of life. Even though most people now live in cities, keeping pets is a mainstream activity. Pets became widespread only with the onset of large-scale industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth century. Pet keeping can even be seen as a kind of lament for a lost closeness to nature.⁵ And even though most people no longer need to grow their own food, many urban people have gardens, allotments, window boxes, houseplants, or cut flowers. Among town and city dwellers, millions of people still connect with the nonhuman world through walking in parks, woods, and countryside, and many millions spend holidays beside the sea. Many people find great satisfaction in working outdoors, and large numbers volunteer to work on organic farms, in woods, and on conservation projects.⁶

Benefits of Exposure to More-Than-Human Nature

The effects of exposure to the natural world have been studied scientifically.⁷ According to a recent summary of this research, “Nature improves mental health—people are less depressed when they have better access to green spaces. The beneficial effect is not just a matter of physical exercise, although that is part of the picture. There is something about natural environments that improves people’s well-being . . . Put simply, being in nature feels good.”⁸

Studies in Japan of the practice of “forest bathing” (shinrin-yoku) have shown that wandering in the woods has calming physiological and psychological effects, including a reduction in the levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the blood⁹ and an enhancement of activity of the immune system.¹⁰ In summary, “forest visits promote both physical and mental health by reducing stress.”¹¹

In a recent study in Stanford, California, randomly assigned participants went on a fifty-minute walk, either in an urban or a natural environment. They were given a series of psychological tests before and after their walk. Those who went on the nature walk were less anxious and had fewer negative ruminations than before the walk, while those who went on urban walks showed no change. The nature walkers’ working memories improved, too.¹² In short, they were happier and more attentive.

Hard-core scientists do not trust subjective impressions alone. They like to see what is happening in the brain. In a follow-up study, the Stanford researchers scanned the brains of participants after urban or nature walks. Those who walked in a natural setting had a reduced tendency to brood and, sure enough, the region of the brain most associated with brooding, the subgenual prefrontal cortex, was less active in those who had walked in a leafy, natural setting than those who walked along busy roads.¹³

These conclusions would not have surprised the founders of the conservation movement in the nineteenth century, or those public-spirited campaigners and visionary town planners who gave our cities their parks and other green spaces. They understood clearly enough the need for areas of outdoor recreation, as discussed below.

However, even though there are many available green spaces, a recent survey in the U.K. indicated that 60 percent of the population does not spend any time “near nature” in a given week.¹⁴ This despite the fact that the official government policy is “to strengthen connections between people and nature, and in particular for every child to be able to experience and learn in the natural environment.”¹⁵ As a step toward implementing this policy, the government commissioned a large-scale study in 2013–14 of children’s outdoor activities in England. A majority (88 percent) “visited the natural environment” at least once in the previous year; 70 percent visited at least once a week. Children from high-income households spent more time outdoors than children from low-income households. Not surprisingly, the oldest children in the survey (thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds) made the most visits to parks, playgrounds, or playing fields with no adults present. About 11 percent of visits were to local woodland, 10 percent to local rivers or lakes, and 7 percent to the local countryside. However, about 12 percent of children (about 1.3 million children in England) spent almost no time outdoors.

In the United States, the writer Richard Louv has called this disconnection between children and the natural world “nature-deficit disorder.” In his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, he linked this lack of connection to childhood trends such as attention deficit disorder, depression, and obesity. He found that average eight-year-olds were better able to identify cartoon characters than trees or animals in the neighborhood. A typical fourth-grade child said, “I like to play indoors because that’s where all the electric outlets are.”¹⁶

Louv summarized research showing that environment-based education helps children develop better skills in problem-solving and in decision-­making. And they have more fun. Unfortunately, there are even more incentives for children to stay indoors. By 2016, many American children were spending five to seven hours in front of screens every day,¹⁷ and children in the U.K., up to six hours.¹⁸ Contemporary official guidelines recommend that children should not start using screens until they are two years old. But many do so earlier. Children, even toddlers, are in uncharted territory. The artificial world of screens and social media is engulfing them to an unprecedented degree. This is a vast, uncontrolled experiment with the future of humanity.

Children’s Connections with Nature

Urbanization, the growth of digital media, and parental fears mean that most children spend less time outdoors than in all previous generations. But there is no doubt that, given the chance, many feel a sense of connection with the more-than-human world.

The Religious Experience Research Unit at Oxford, founded by the evolutionary zoologist Sir Alister Hardy in the 1960s, collected many thousands of accounts of spiritual experiences. Out of this large sample, about 15 percent started with references to experiences in childhood.¹⁹ On further questioning, most of the authors of these accounts said that these childhood experiences felt exceptionally authoritative and significant. Most said that they were unable to talk about their experiences to teachers or family members at the time. As one person put it, “This inner knowledge was exciting and absorbingly interesting, but it remained unsaid, because, even if I could have expressed it, no one would have understood.”²⁰

Here is one example of a remembered childhood experience from the Religious Experience Research Unit collection:

[When I was a child] I seemed to have a more direct relationship with flowers, trees and animals, and there are certain particular occasions which I can still remember in which I was overcome by a great joy as I saw the first irises opening or picked daisies in the dew-covered lawn before breakfast. There seemed to be no barrier between the flowers and myself, and this was a source of unutterable delight.²¹

Other respondents spoke of “feeling a timeless unity with all life,” “a deep and overwhelming sense of gratitude,” and “a sense of unending peace and security that seemed to be part of the beauty of the morning.”²²

But do these recollections, written in middle or old age, accurately reflect the experiences of childhood, or are they seen retrospectively through rose-tinted glasses? A British teacher, Michael Paffard, tried to answer this question by asking his teenage students to fill in a questionnaire and write an account of their own experiences of joyful or awe-inducing connection with nature, if they felt they had any relevant experiences to describe. Out of four hundred students, 55 percent attempted to describe experiences that could be classified as natural-mystical. Key words used to describe their experiences included “joyful,” “serene,” “ecstatic,” “holy,” “blissful,” “uplifting,” “timeless,” and “peaceful.”²³ The kinds of experiences they described were very similar to those recalled by much older people.

In addition to feeling exhilarated, some of the respondents felt afraid when confronted with the sky, the mountains, the sea, or uninhabited spaces. A sixteen-year-old boy who went to a boarding school wrote:

I live in Essex on the edge of a vast expanse of salt marsh . . . Often in the autumn months I go and sit on the sea wall and spend the evening looking across the marshland. When I am away at School I long for its lonely wildness and the sense of freedom and the strength of nature that it gives. Yet it is terrifyingly desolate when it gets darker and the sea begins to rise and I must get away. But I always have to return to it.²⁴

In Paffard’s study, in 67 percent of the accounts, the young people were alone when they had these experiences, and most of them took place in the evening or at night.²⁵ Most had not sought these experiences deliberately; they occurred spontaneously. But some people made a practice of going to special places where they felt inspired, like hilltops, meadows, lakes, woods, or beaches.

As a child, I spent a lot of time outdoors and felt a strong connection with the natural world, and a sense of belonging. This made me want to study science, especially biology. I was good at science at school, but what I learned was no longer based on direct experience of an organism’s life. Virtually all the plants and animals we studied at school, and later at university, were dead. We killed what we studied, except for the animals used in vivisection experiments, which were killed afterward. We dissected earthworms, frogs, dogfish, and rabbits. We took flowers apart and looked at their organs. We looked at tissues under the microscope. Killing animals for the sake of science was called sacrificing. The animals were being sacrificed on the altar of science.

This kind of science had very little relation to my own experience. I tried to dismiss my feelings about the life of the natural world as unscientific, but they would not go away. I later came to realize that many people experience nature as truly alive when they are children, and they are encouraged to do so through children’s stories and books about talking animals. As a child, I lived in an animistic world that was encouraged by adults. But as I grew up, it was made very clear to me that this childish way of thinking should be left behind. To believe that animals and plants were more than complex machines, and to think of nature as alive, was like believing in fairies.

Our entire culture is split between the experience of direct connections with the natural world, often established in childhood, and the mechanistic theory of nature that dominates the sciences and secular society. We are all inheritors of this split. In the official world, from 9 AM to 5 PM on Mondays through Fridays—the world of work, education, business, and politics—­nature is conceived of mechanistically, as an inanimate source of raw materials to be exploited for economic development. By contrast, in our unofficial, private worlds, nature is identified with the countryside, as opposed to the city, and above all with unspoiled wilderness.²⁶

Since the nineteenth century, and still today, many people have wanted to get rich, if necessary by exploiting natural resources, so that they can afford to buy a place in the country to “get away from it all.” On Friday evenings, the roads out of the cities of the Western world are clogged with traffic as millions of people try to get back to nature in a car. They are strongly motivated to do so. They are expressing a fundamental need.

How Nature Was Split from God

How did this split come about?

One of its roots lies in the relationship between the Jewish people and the Holy Land in which they once lived. The pre-Jewish religions of Palestine were polytheistic, with goddesses as well as gods, and they recognized many sacred places, including trees, groves, standing stones, mountains, springs, and rivers. In the early stages of their life in the Holy Land, the Jewish people continued to worship at the ancient sacred places.²⁷ Things began to change with the building of King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, followed by attempts to suppress all other shrines, giving the temple a monopoly. The one God had one center. Worship on hilltops, in sacred groves, and at other ancient holy places was treated with suspicion, if not violent hostility.

The pre-Christian religions of Europe, like the pre-Jewish religions of Palestine, were polytheistic, and there were many holy places. But unlike the Jewish prophets and kings who tried to focus all ritual worship in one sacred place, Christians did not impose a monopoly. During the conversion of the Near East and Europe from the worship of the old gods and goddesses, many of the traditional sacred places and seasonal festivals continued in a Christianized form. In the Celtic Church in Ireland and Britain, local saints achieved a remarkable harmony between the druidic past and the new religion, like Saint Cuthbert (ca. 634–87), who was abbot of the monastery of the holy island of Lindisfarne, but preferred to live as a hermit. According to the Venerable Bede (672–735), the author of The Life and Miracles of St. Cuthbert, Bishop of Lindesfarne, Cuthbert foretold many future events and described “what things were going on elsewhere.” He also spent his nights in the sea. According to a monk who crept out at night to observe him secretly:

When he left the monastery, he went down to the sea, which flows beneath, and going into it, until the water reached his neck and arms, spent the night in praising God. When the dawn of day approached, he came out of the water, and, falling on his knees, began to pray again. Whilst he was doing this, two otters came up from the sea, and, lying down before him on the sand, breathed upon his feet, and wiped them with their hair after which, having received his blessing, they returned to their native element. Cuthbert himself returned home in time to join in the accustomed hymns with the other brethren.

Sometimes practices of the old religions were assimilated as a matter of deliberate papal policy.²⁸ And to the old sacred places were added new ones connected with the saints: places where they had seen visions, where they had lived and died, and where their relics were enshrined.²⁹ I discuss this further in the context of pilgrimage in chapter 7. The incorporation of archaic religious elements into the Christian religion is still obvious in Roman Catholic and Orthodox countries. Think of the holy wells in Ireland, the sacred mountain Croagh Patrick, or the many shrines of the Holy Mother of God.

Meanwhile, in early Christian theology and in the orthodox teachings of the Middle Ages based on Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, nature was alive. The sun and the planets, the earth, plants and animals were all animated by souls. The living God was the source of this living world and continually interacted with it. As the twelfth-century mystic, composer, and abbess Saint Hildegard of Bingen put it, “The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature.”³⁰ Medieval Christian theology was animistic, and God’s being underlay the being of nature. God was in nature, and nature was in God.³¹ Nature was alive, not inanimate and mechanical. The God of medieval Christianity, which gave us the great cathedrals of Europe, was the God of a living world.

In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation led to a radical break in this Christian relationship to sacred times and places and to the natural world. The Reformers were trying to establish a purified form of Christianity, rejecting the corruptions and abuses of the Roman Church. Personal faith and repentance were what mattered; seasonal festivals, pilgrimages, devotion to the Holy Mother, and the cults of saints were denounced as pagan superstitions. As John Calvin put it, “Nuns came in place of vestal virgins; the church of All Saints to succeed the Pantheon; against ceremonies were set ceremonies not much unlike.”³²

The Reformers were trying to bring about an irreversible change in attitude, eradicating the traditional idea of spiritual power pervading the natural world and especially present in sacred places and in spiritually charged, material objects. They wanted to purify religion, and this purification involved the disenchantment of the world.³³ The spiritual realm was confined to human beings. By contrast, the natural world, governed by God’s laws, was incapable of responding to human ceremonies, invocations, or rituals; it was spiritually neutral or indifferent and could not transmit any spiritual power in or of itself.

The Protestant Reformation thus prepared the ground for the mechanistic revolution in science in the following century. Nature was already disenchanted, and the material world was separated from the life of the spirit. The idea that the universe was a vast machine fitted this kind of Protestant theology, and so did the constriction of the realm of the soul to a small region of the human brain. The domains of science and religion could henceforth be separated. Science took the whole of nature for its province, including the human body; religion took the moral and spiritual aspects of the human soul.

With the seventeenth-century revolution in science, nature became machinelike, unconscious, inanimate, and lacking any purpose of its own. The world-machine was created and set in motion by God in the first place, but thereafter worked automatically. God’s main role was in the supernatural realm of angels, spirits, and human minds, but he still interacted with the realm of nature occasionally, by suspending its laws and intervening through miracles. Isaac Newton thought that planetary orbits required occasional adjustments by supernatural intervention.

By the end of the eighteenth century, celestial mechanics had become more sophisticated. Theoreticians no longer needed miraculous adjustments to the machinery, and God became superfluous for understanding the workings of nature. His role was increasingly confined to the beginning and the end of time. At the beginning he was the creator; at the end he would be the judge at the Last Judgement. His religious role was primarily moral.

Thus God became increasingly remote. By the eighteenth century, many influential Enlightenment intellectuals such as Voltaire in France and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in America had adopted the philosophy of Deism, in which God’s remoteness was made explicit. God had created the machinery of nature in the first place according to rational laws and designs, but could not respond to worship and prayer. He provided no basis for the regular practices of the Christian religion, or any other religion. From here it was a short step to atheism. By assuming that the universe was eternal and needed no creator, the residual God of Deism became redundant.

The Romantic Reaction

To start with, the mechanistic vision of nature was portrayed as a matter for celebration. For the rationalists of the eighteenth century, nature was a rational system of order, most clearly reflected in the Newtonian motions of the celestial bodies. Nature was uniform, symmetrical, and harmonious. She could be known through reason; she was indeed the very basis of reason and aesthetic judgement. According to Alexander Pope:

First follow Nature, and your judgement frame

By her just standard, which is still the same:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,

One clear, unchang’d and universal light.

But by the end of the eighteenth century, nature came to be understood in an almost opposite sense. Powered by sometimes dark, disconcerting, and unknown modes of being, she was irregular, asymmetric, and inexhaustibly diverse. In England this change in fashion was expressed through landscape gardening. Instead of clipped and manicured formal gardens, the landscaper sought to imitate an ideal of natural wildness. One model for the new style was found in paintings of pastoral scenes; another was found in Chinese gardening.

Attitudes toward wild places themselves changed radically. To most of our ancestors, forests, mountains, and wildernesses were dangerous. In the seventeenth century, travelers frequently referred to mountains as “terrible,” “hideous,” and “rough.”³⁴ Even at the end of the eighteenth century, most Europeans found uncultivated wilderness totally unpleasing: “There are few who do not prefer the busy scenes of cultivation to the greatest of nature’s rough productions,” wrote William Gilpin in 1791.³⁵ Dr. Samuel Johnson shared the majority view and said of the Scottish Highlands, “An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility.”³⁶

The new taste for wild nature was sophisticated, inspired by literary and artistic models. Scenes were picturesque because they looked like pictures; they were romantic because they recalled the imaginary world of romances, far away and long ago.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Romantic taste for wild nature had led to a dislike for human interference. The painter John Constable wrote in 1822: “A gentleman’s park is my aversion. It is not beauty because it is not nature.”³⁷ Romantic nature was best experienced in solitude, and part of the attraction of the wilderness was its remoteness from the bustle of cities and industrial activity. As traveling became easier, many well-off English people attached an unprecedented importance to visiting wild and romantic places. As Robert Southey wrote in 1807:

Within the last thirty years, a taste for the picturesque has sprung up; and a course of summer travelling is now looked upon to be essential . . . While one of the flocks of fashion migrates to the sea-coast, another flies off to the mountains of Wales, to the lakes in the northern provinces, or to Scotland; . . . all to study the picturesque, a new science for which a new language has been formed, and for which the English have discovered a new sense in themselves, which assuredly was not possessed by their fathers.³⁸

By the mid-nineteenth century, many people thought that solitude in natural surroundings was essential for the spiritual regeneration of city dwellers. Some wilderness should be preserved both for individuals and for the sanity of society as a whole.

Among English Romantic poets, William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was arguably the most influential. Wordsworth repeatedly lamented the loss of connection with the divine, transcendent realm to which young children are open. His ode “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” contains these words:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light . . .

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the East

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

In America, as in Europe, a Romantic sense of nature grew up under literary and artistic influences. In particular, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay “Nature” helped transmit a new vision of humans’ relationship to the natural world. Instead of Americans trying to impose their own historically determined consciousness on the wilderness, they could recognize their true, living relation to the land. Emerson realized that this reverential attitude to nature was rare:

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature . . . The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood . . . In the woods . . . a man casts off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Standing on the bare ground . . . the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.³⁹

By the 1850s, the opening of railways and the acceleration of economic development had made the uncolonized lands of America increasingly accessible. The wilderness could no longer be taken for granted. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), a disciple of Emerson’s, was one of the first to sense the threat to virgin nature. He proposed, in vain, that each town in Massachusetts should save a five-hundred-acre piece of woodland that would remain forever wild. The greatest of the Emersonian lovers and defenders of wild nature was John Muir (1838–1914), founder of the Sierra Club and chief protector of Yosemite National Park (see chapter 4).

A central feature of Romanticism was its rejection of mechanical metaphors. Nature was alive and organic, rather than dead and mechanical. The poet Percy Shelley (1792–1822) was a Romantic atheist, against religion rather than anti-spiritual; he had no doubt about a living power in nature, which he called the “Soul of the Universe,” the “all-sufficing Power,” or the “Spirit of Nature.” He was also a pioneering campaigner for vegetarianism, because he valued animals as sentient beings.⁴⁰

There were also Romantic Deists, who included the leading pioneers of evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin suggested that God endued life or nature with a creative capacity that was thereafter expressed without the need for divine guidance or intervention. In his book Zoonomia, in 1794, he asked rhetorically:

Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!⁴¹

For Erasmus Darwin, living beings were self-improving, and the results of the efforts of parents were inherited by their offspring. Likewise, Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), in his Zoological Philosophy in 1809, suggested that animals developed new habits in response to their environment, and their adaptations were passed on to their descendants. A power inherent in life produced increasingly complex organisms, moving them up a ladder of progress. Lamarck attributed the origin of the power of life to “the Supreme Author,” who created “an order of things which gave existence successively to all that we see.”⁴² Like Erasmus Darwin, he was a Romantic Deist. So was Robert Chambers, who popularized the idea of progressive evolution in his bestselling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published anonymously in 1844. He argued that everything in nature was progressing to a higher state as a result of a God-given “law of creation.”⁴³ His work was controversial from both a religious and a scientific point of view, but like Lamarck’s theory, it was attractive to atheists because it removed the need for a divine designer.

These different worldviews can be summarized as follows:

Worldview	God	Nature	Evolution
Medieval Christian	Interactive	Living organism	No
Early mechanistic	Interactive	Machine	No
Enlightenment Deism	Creator only	Machine	No
Romantic Deism	Creator only	Living organism	Yes
Romantic atheism	No God	Living organism	Yes
Materialism	No God	Machine	Yes
Panentheism	Interactive	Living organism	Yes

Some people identify their experience of more-than-human nature with God; others identify it with nature, as opposed to God. Still others (myself included) see God in nature and nature in God, a worldview called panentheism.

The Hidden Goddesses of Materialism

Nature is feminine. In Latin, natura is a feminine noun meaning “birth.” When personified, nature is Mother Nature. Many people who have a negative image of a Father God transfer their allegiance to Mother Nature. Instead of feeling connected to God the Father, they feel connected to the Great Mother. Others, including myself, see no need to choose between the Father and the Mother. The very use of these gendered metaphors implies that both are essential. Father and Mother are correlative terms: They each need the other.

If nature were the sole source of all life, and if life has evolved, then Mother Nature should be credited with more and more freedom and creativity. Erasmus’s grandson Charles Darwin succeeded in turning this Romantic vision of the creative power of nature from poetry into a scientific theory. Like the Romantics, Charles Darwin saw Mother Nature as the source of all forms of life. Through her prodigious fertility, her powers of spontaneous variation, and her powers of selection, she could create life without the need for the intelligent design of a machine-making God. With customary honesty, he remarked: “For brevity’s sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an intelligent power . . . I have, also, often personified the word Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity.”⁴⁴ He advised his readers to forget the implications of these turns of phrase.

Instead, if we remember what the personification of nature implies, we see her as the Mother from whose womb all life comes forth and to whom all life returns. She is prodigiously fertile, but she is also cruel and terrible, the devourer of her own offspring. Her fertility greatly impressed Darwin, but he made her destructive aspect the primary creative power. Natural selection, working by killing, was “a power incessantly ready for action.”⁴⁵ In India, the black goddess Kali personifies this destructive aspect of the Great Mother.

For modern materialists, nature, or matter, is the source of all things: All life emerges from her, and to her all life returns. Indeed, the very word matter, the basis for materialism, comes from the Latin materia, which itself comes from the word for mother, mater. Nature gives birth to us, encloses and contains us; she provides our nourishment, warmth, and protection. But we are utterly at her mercy, for she is also terrifying, uncaring, and merciless; she devours and destroys. Materialism is not solely a philosophical theory. Below the surface, it is an unconscious cult of the Great Mother.

The Recent Revival of Animism

In a new turn of the spiral, some atheist philosophers themselves are challenging the materialist theory of nature. This theory assumes that matter is unconscious and that it is the only reality—or, more generally, in a variant of materialism called physicalism, the physical world is unconscious and the only reality.

Starting with these assumptions, the very existence of human consciousness is almost impossible to explain. How can unconscious matter inside brains generate consciousness? Modern philosophers of mind call the very existence of human consciousness “the hard problem.” Some dismiss consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain activity, rather like a shadow that does nothing. Others go so far as to deny that consciousness exists or dismiss it as an illusion.⁴⁶ On the other hand, a minority takes a traditional dualist view, treating matter and consciousness as totally different, seeing consciousness as immaterial and outside space and time. But then they have the problem of explaining how the two are related to each other, how they interact.

An increasing number of philosophers, including the British philosopher Galen Strawson⁴⁷ and the American philosopher Thomas Nagel,⁴⁸ have come to the conclusion that there is only one way out of the materialist-­dualist dilemma, namely panpsychism, the idea that even atoms and molecules have a primitive kind of mentality or experience. (The Greek word pan means “all,” and psyche means “soul” or “mind.”) Panpsychism does not mean that atoms are conscious in the sense that we are, but only that they have some aspects of mentality or experience. More complex forms of mind and experience emerge in more complex systems.⁴⁹

These philosophers are not claiming that all material objects, like tables and cars, have minds, experiences, or purposes. Tables and cars do not form, organize, and maintain themselves, and they do not have purposes of their own; they are made by people in factories to serve human purposes. Only self-organizing systems—in other words, systems that form, organize, and maintain themselves—have mind-like properties or experiences, including atoms, molecules, crystals, cells, plants, and animals. And their mental aspects are not necessarily conscious. After all, much of our own mental activity is unconscious, which is why we speak of our unconscious minds.

According to the panpsychist philosophy, in self-organizing systems, complex forms of experience emerge spontaneously. These systems are at the same time physical (nonexperiential) and experiential; in other words, they have experiences.

As Strawson put it, “Once upon a time there was relatively unorganised matter with both experiential and non-experiential fundamental features. It organised into increasingly complex forms, both experiential and non-­experiential, by many processes including evolution by natural selection.”⁵⁰

Unlike the usual materialist attempt to explain consciousness by saying that it emerges as an epiphenomenon or an illusion from totally unconscious matter, Strawson’s and Nagel’s proposals are that more complex forms of experience emerge from less complex ones. There is a difference of degree, but not of kind.

Panpsychism is not a new idea. It is another word for animism. Most people used to believe in it, and many still do. In medieval Europe, philosophers and theologians assumed without question that the world was full of animate beings. Plants and animals had souls, and stars and planets were governed by intelligences. But confusingly, Strawson regards panpsychism as an updated version of materialism. He is still an atheist, as is Nagel, and still thinks matter is the only reality; however, he has broadened the definition of matter to include experience or mind. This broadened, animistic materialism soon takes us far beyond the realm of old-school materialism.

If nature is alive, if the universe is more like an organism than a machine, then there must be self-organizing systems with minds at all levels, including the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy—and ultimately the entire cosmos. The more-than-human world includes all these levels of consciousness.

In lifting our attention from the earth to the sky, the most important of all celestial bodies is the sun. The sun sustains all life on earth. If we take panpsychism seriously, then new questions inevitably arise. Is the sun alive? Is it conscious?

The Conscious Sun

As soon as you ask if the sun is conscious, you realize that you are violating a scientific taboo, the purpose of which is to stop us from taking seriously what our ancestors believed. Throughout most of human history, most people thought of the sun as conscious. For some, like the Indians and classical Greeks, the sun was a god; for others, like the Japanese, she was a goddess. In northern Europe, the sun was also a goddess; in Latvian and Lithuanian mythology, she was called Saule.

This mythological background is reflected in the gender of the words for sun. In Germanic languages, she is feminine—in modern German, die Sonne. In southern European mythology and in Latin-based languages, he is masculine—in modern French, le soleil. Children implicitly think the sun is conscious and draw it with a smiley face.

From the modern materialist point of view, the fact that people all over the world thought of the sun as alive, divine, and conscious disqualifies this idea from serious consideration. It is nothing but a childish superstition, an animistic projection of human emotions onto inanimate objects. The fact that children think this way merely proves the point.

Nevertheless, since the early twentieth century, there has been an extraordinary rise of an unconscious sun-worshipping cult, the basis of a multibillion-­dollar tourist industry. Sun-drenched beaches have become mass tourist resorts, and people who go there are often called “sun worshippers.” This aspect of modern life happens on holidays and weekends; it is part of the Romantic side of our cultural divide.

The doctrine that the sun is unconscious has been built into science since the seventeenth century. The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) defined matter as unconscious. He separated off consciousness into the realm of the spirit, which he defined as immaterial. The immaterial realm consisted of God, angels, and human minds. Everything else in nature, including the sun, the stars, the planets, the earth, all animals and human bodies, was mechanical and unconscious. The sun and other stars were unconscious by definition, and from a scientific point of view, they have remained so ever since.

But if the universe is more like an organism than a machine, then so is our galaxy and so is our sun. The sun has highly complex patterns of electromagnetic activity within it and on its surface. Its patterns of activity are much vaster and more complex than the electromagnetic activity in our brains. Most scientists believe that the electromagnetic activity within our brains is the interface between body and mind. Likewise, the complex electromagnetic patterns of activity in and around the sun could be the interface between its body and its mind.

Maybe the sun is conscious, and physical aspects of its mental activity are measurable, just as electrical patterns of activity in brains are measurable.

I cannot prove that the sun is conscious, but a skeptic cannot prove that it is unconscious. From a nondogmatic point of view, the consciousness of the sun is an open question.

This question leads to more questions. If the sun is conscious, why not all stars? And if stars are conscious, then what about entire galaxies? Galaxies are complex electromagnetic systems, with vast electrical currents flowing through the plasma of the galactic arms, which are linked to magnetic lines of force millions of light-years long. The galactic center may be like the brain of the galaxy, and the stars like cells in its body. There may be a vast galactic mind, far exceeding the scope of our sun’s more limited mind, with vast electromagnetic extensions of its activity passing through the spiral galactic arms.

In 1997, I helped to organize a symposium called “Is the Sun Conscious?” at Hazelwood House in Devon over the summer solstice.⁵¹ We assembled a small group of people, including a cosmologist, a physicist, an expert on mythology, an Indian philosopher, and some psychologists. On the summer solstice itself, June 21, we got up early and went to watch the sun rise over Dartmoor. It was cloudy and raining until the moment of sunrise, when the sun broke through the clouds and a perfect rainbow appeared behind us.

If the sun is conscious, then what does it think about? What kinds of decisions can it make? We thought that one group of decisions might concern its wider body, the solar system. The sun’s light permeates the solar system, as does the solar wind—energetic streams of particles moving outward from the sun. Fluctuations in solar activity change the intensity of the solar wind; they influence the northern and southern lights, they affect the ionosphere and radio transmissions, and they modulate the frequency of lightning. When intense bursts of solar activity are pointed toward the earth, the resulting huge outpourings of charged particles can cause power outages and catastrophic breakdowns of electromagnetic technologies. The American space agency NASA issues regular space weather forecasts so that we have some warning of solar events that affect our life on earth.⁵²

If the sun is conscious and has control over its body, it could modulate the entire solar system, including life on earth, by choosing when and where to fire off solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The sun could, if it wanted to, close down our technologies by an ejection directed toward the earth, causing enormous power outages. We have set up long-distance power transmission systems, like the British National Grid, which can act as aerials for these solar pulses. A major outburst of solar activity could melt down transformers, and entire power grids would fail; they might take months to repair. The sun also modulates life on earth more subtly, including the influences of its eleven-year cycles, in which sunspot activity rises and falls and its magnetic poles reverse.

The sun might also be concerned about its own peer group, the other stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way. We know almost nothing about interstellar communication or in what way the entire galaxy modulates the stars. But this is another realm in which the sun’s consciousness is likely to come into play.

We do not know what level of consciousness the sun has. Is it only concerned with its own bodily functioning? Or is it more like a mind that knows what is going on within the solar system, including what we ourselves are doing right now? Perhaps the sun can sense directly what is happening on earth through the electromagnetic field. The electrical changes in our radio and TV transmissions, in our cell phones and computers, in our brains and throughout our bodies are all happening within the electromagnetic field of the earth, which is embedded within the electromagnetic field of the sun. If the sun’s mind can sense what is happening throughout this field, then it could know what is happening on earth and everywhere else in the solar system.

Can we communicate with the sun? Certainly many people worship the sun and make offerings and prayers to it, either in its own right or as a channel of God’s light, or as both.

Among the practices of yoga is surya namaskar, salutation to the sun. I have done this practice almost every morning for more than forty years, which is one of the reasons I am so interested in the sun. Another Indian solar practice is the Gayatri mantra, which I have often chanted, a prayer for the divine light of the sun to illuminate our meditation.

From a spiritual point of view, the light of the sun is the light of the Spirit, which shines through the sun and all other stars. Except at sunrise or sunset, or seen through a light-absorbing barrier, this light dazzles and overpowers us. According to many spiritual writers, including Saint Anselm (ca. 1033–1109), the sun is like God, and God is like the sun:

Truly, O Lord, this is the unapproachable light in which thou dwellest; for truly there is nothing else which can penetrate this light, that it may see thee there . . . My understanding cannot reach that light, for it shines too bright. It does not comprehend it, nor does the eye of my soul endure to gaze upon it long. It is dazzled by the brightness, it is overcome by the greatness, it is overwhelmed by the infinity, it is dazzled by the largeness, of the light.⁵³

Our New Situation

We are in an unprecedented situation. The withdrawal of God, consciousness, and purpose from the universe of mechanistic science has been accompanied by a vast expansion of our vision of nature in space and time, from the fleeting appearance of evanescent subatomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider to the discovery of trillions of galaxies beyond our own in a universe that has been evolving for more than thirteen billion years. Now, with the reemergence of panpsychism, this vastly expanded universe can take on a new life and meaning. Our direct experience of nonhuman nature can again lead us beyond our limited selves to a direct connection with the more-than-human world and the more-than-human consciousness that underlies it.

But before reaching for distant galaxies or the realm of the ultramicroscopic, it is best to start nearer home.

Two Practices for Reconnecting with More-Than-Human Nature

A SIT SPOT

Find somewhere outdoors where you can sit quietly and safely, and where you can be alone. If you live near the woods, a meadow, or a riverside, then find a sit spot in one of those places. Or find a sit spot very near where you live, even if it is in your garden or on a roof. Unless you find a place nearby, you will find it too hard to visit and spend time there regularly.

The practice is simple. Be there. Get to know that place at different times of day and night, in different weather conditions, in different seasons. Be aware of the four directions and the course the sun takes through the sky. Get to know the plants that grow there and the animals that live there and pass by. Listen to the wind. Listen to the birds and learn to identify them from their songs.

The tracker Jon Young points out that if you sit quietly for about twenty minutes, the animals around you will get used to you and cease to experience you as a source of alarm. You will then be able to notice their alarm calls, especially those of birds. If you are in a garden, their sounds may alert you to a cat walking nearby. In the woods, the alarms will tell you when a person or another animal is moving through the woods and where they are.⁵⁴

Through experiencing the life in your place, you will link your own life to the more-than-human world, and you will soon feel a greater sense of connection and belonging.

THE SUN

Greet the sun in the morning. If the weather is cloudy, turn toward the hidden sun. If your house or garden does not have an eastward view, then acknowledge the daylight as it comes in through your window, flowing from the sun.

During the daytime, when there is an opportunity, turn toward the sun. Do not look at it directly. But at sunrise or sunset, when it is not too bright, look at it directly and give thanks for its light, and thank the source of all light, whose light shines through it. Ask for the divine splendor of the sun to illuminate your meditation.