Finding Our Power in How We See, Hear, and Speak: Hearing Both the Speech of Other People as Well as Trees as the Way the World Speaks in Us

I was recently walking down my rural road. It was a quiet afternoon, mostly sunny and in the 80s. About a half mile from home, on the edge of a forest, the road turned sharply. When I reached the turn, it was suddenly windy. The tree leaves were shaking. The energy was the same as what precedes a rainstorm. But there were no clouds. And as soon as I walked 5 or 10 feet past this group of trees, the leaves were quiet.

 

I realized I had noticed the wind that inhabits this space many times before. And this was, as I said, especially true minutes or maybe hours before a rainstorm, when the leaves and trees in this curve in the road vibrated. It served as a semaphore or audiphore, a warning system, to turn back before the rains came. Why did the wind speak like this? Did it have to do with a change in air pressure caused by the road turning and butting against the forest? Or something else? It felt like the spot had a life of its own and could speak on its own. But somehow, before now, I hadn’t grasped anything of what was being said.

 

Life can give us so much, but we miss a great deal of it. In a way, our senses exist both to notice and ignore, to sense as well as filter what we perceive. The research psychologist and professor Dr. Robert Ornstein talks about the senses as “data-reduction systems.” He points out if we took in everything, if we became conscious of everything going on around us at any point in time, we’d be overwhelmed. It would be too much stimulation.

 

Ornstein quotes the 19th century philosopher and physician, often called the “father of American psychology,” William James as saying the mind acts like a sculptor. Out of the raw and swarming chaos around us we, through cumulative choices and with the help of our ancestors, our culture, and linguistic systems, we select this and reject that. We create the world we live in and feel. We’re also taught or conditioned to accept this and deny that. What we consciously perceive greatly depends on what we’re taught to see, what we expect and pay attention to, and what we value. Other minds create other worlds.

 

We also depend, of course, on what nature gives us. For example, our eyes can perceive only a tiny fraction of available light. The possibly visible light in the electromagnetic spectrum is so wide, ranging in wavelength from “less than one billionth of a meter to more than a thousand meters,” says Ornstein. But the human eye can detect only a tiny part of that, only 400-700 billionths of a meter.

 

For humans, ultraviolet light is barely perceptible. Ed Yong, in his wonderful book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, says ultraviolet is “an invisible hue just on the edge of our vision—a perceptual void that our imaginations are keen to fill.” But to bees, some fish as well as reindeer, dogs, cats, etc. UV signals are common.

 

So, thinking of our eyes as only windows to the world is a limited metaphor. We’re not merely windows; we’re not, as some would say, merely mechanical processes. And we’re not separate from the world we sculpt. How we think about reality strongly influences our ability to act in it. How we think about our ability to make choices influences how well and what we choose. This is so crucial to recognize. If we think we have no role, we create a world in which we’re powerless. Getting us to think we’re powerless in shaping what we see is a belief propagated by autocrats to enable them to control us….

 

*To read the whole article, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

How Do We Face What We Believe is Unfaceable?

How do we face a fact or situation we believe we cannot face? Or respond skillfully to a personal or collective crisis?

 

In the Winter 2021 issue of Tricycle Magazine: The Buddhist Review, there is an article by environmentalist Paul Hawken adapted from his new book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation. Hawken says we live on a planet dying due to severed connections between human beings and the natural world that sustains and contains us. The decline of the earth is its’ adaptation to what we are doing to it.

 

72% of Americans know that the consensus of scientists is that climate change is human caused. A U. N. panel recently labeled the situation a climate emergency. But Hawken says that if we stop making the mistakes we’re making, if we end the disconnection, if we cease the production of fossil fuels, redirect the economy to stop overconsumption, deforestation, wars, etc. the earth will come back to life. This is difficult but possible. But many don’t, won’t or can’t allow this to even be a possibility in their mind.

 

Many have come to think we have already gone too far, or it would take generations to stop catastrophic global warming. But Hawken says, if we can reduce carbon gain and achieve zero net carbon emissions by 2050, we can regenerate the planet in one or two decades.

 

It is easier to not-think about it. To not consider the possibility that the planet, or human life on it, can be saved. For some of us, to bring the earth’s future back to life inside our heart and mind brings the hurt back to life. Pain. It can feel easier to fashion scabs of anger or ig-norance than face pain.

 

I think of two friends and neighbors who say they have given up. They usually vote. Maybe this is a sign that vestiges of hope or commitment remain⎼ or of love. But they won’t do anything more. Won’t help get out the vote or call politicians or take to the streets. They say it will do no good. Maybe the grief they feel over the dying earth has immobilized them.

 

And I understand this response. I too feel the grief for what and whom we’ve lost, for the losses from the pandemic, for an easier time when I did not feel the earth itself was on the way to the emergency room, or that white nationalists might once again inhabit the White House like they did just a year ago. I, too, yearn for comfort.

 

In a recent blog, I described how it’s less the situation we face, or the sensations we feel, that determine our emotional state, but our response to the situation and feelings. We often think of fear as what readies us to act to protect ourselves. But as psychologist William James pointed out over a hundred years ago, we don’t have an emotion and then act. We don’t see a bear in the woods, or maybe a domestic terrorist on the street, and then feel fear, and run.

 

Instead, our response is constructed in stages. We feel fear as our body begins to sweat, our heartbeat speeds up, our legs twitch. Fear is an interpretation added to sensations. The sensations themselves are the same as a stress response or emotions like excitement. The interpretation includes thoughts such as labeling a threat as unmanageable as well as an inclination to act, for example, by hiding….

 

**To read the whole article, please click on the link for the Good Men Project, who first published the piece.