The Tree Falls in the Forest
Some truths about the world as revealed to me by the ayahuasca vine
There is no difference between God and the world. What the world does is what God does. Therefore when there is a message in the world it is a message from God. What God does is what the world does. Therefore when God expresses something it is expressed through the world.
The world objectively exists. Every part of it is miraculous because for it to exist is a miracle. Within it there are further stupendously unlikely events such as those that lead to our own existences. We objectively exist. So do each creature and spore and cell and viral particle. These are also miracles.
Everything and every thing is miraculous and also could not have been otherwise. Unbeing contains within it all possible time and therefore all possible synchronicities, as yet unexpressed; but the coincidence that brings unbeing into being is contained within unbeing and therefore must be expressed.
Within these contradictions lies reality. The motive and the medium, the miracle and the fact, are constitutive of one another.
The world does not require your belief in order to exist. Nor does it require you to validate its existence. Therefore God does not require your belief in order to exist and God does not require you to validate God’s existence.
God expresses God; the world expresses world; we can see or not see this. A whale breaches in the bay and I would not have seen it had I been looking at my phone. A firefly stays above me all night on my late mother’s birthday. I can see this or not see this but it happens either way. The tree falls in the forest.
To be closer to the world is to be closer to God. To be closer to God is to be closer to the world. We are the apes who sing to plants; the plants are God, we are God, we are both the world. The I and the Thou are expressions of the same thing.
To be cut off from the world is to be cut off from God. We are of the world and cannot be apart from it and therefore cannot really ever be apart from God but we can be further or nearer. We can perceive and understand or we can ignore and forget.
To perceive the plant is to get closer to the world. To perceive the plant as the Thou is to get closer still. To feel what it is to be a plant is to get closer yet. To forget that the feeling of being a plant exists is to be further from the world. To forget that the plant is not an It is to be further still. To not perceive the plant at all is to be further yet.
All things are remembered because the past is unchanging and the present is the result of the past. The past is encoded into the world which is how it is remembered by God. The world is the memory of God. Nothing can ever be forgotten because the past cannot be destroyed. All things which have been will always continue to have been.
To be a plant feels like a long, slow orgasm. The plant is blind and deaf and does not feel but the plant perceives. The plant is a coursing, jittering fire. It flings its embers outward and they catch and grow and fling their embers outward. The plant does not know fear but it knows its enemies. It does not hate its enemies but accepts them. Its enemies skitter sinuously, usually too fast to see, but they are out there in the blindness, many-legged, dampening the flame. The plant feels the enemies in its soul and is one with them.
The plant anchors itself and accepts everything as acceptance is its register. It ingathers and basks and encompasses. The world sustains it and it accepts the sustenance in ecstasy. It entwines itself into the medium and touches the other entities there, talking to them. The medium is never silent and neither are the entities. Their cells connect and exchange. The plant knows the entities well and is allied with them. The hyphae. They are always together.
To be a plant feels like rolling your eyes back into your head until you see starshot blackness and the inside of your own mind. To be a plant feels like slowly feeding bubbles of joyous elixir into a gap in your chest over your heart. To be a plant feels like melting into the ground and flinging yourself into the air very very slowly at the same time. To be a plant feels like holding every moment inside yourself, trapping each second in translucent gelatinous fluid for safekeeping. You perceive so much but it’s untranslatable, untransferrable. In the mind of the mammal it is just flashes and tuggings and the acid flavour of an alien awareness.
You are not a plant; you are a different kind of thing. You are a mammal.
Your genes reach back two hundred million years into the Triassic jungles and they know things. You are a bundle of nerve endings, a sensorial experience that moves around, feeling the world through your whiskers, transforming the light into glorious images, capturing waves in the air and acting, acting, always acting.
As a walking nervous system you cannot help but to feel, all the time. Dissociating from the sensorium only shunts it into another place where it is felt anyway. You’re a mammal; you are meant to shake it off. You are built to shake it off. To reset the buffer by taking your small warm body and thrashing it about for a few seconds.
You suckled your mother’s milk. That is what it means to be your kind of creature. Watching your mother die is a cataclysm for your kind of creature. The thing to do here is scream, and gnash, and throw yourself into the dirt, and feel the flood. For as long as it takes.
You have to take the world into yourself to survive. You have to crush it into bits and swallow it. You have to know which bits you can eat. You have to learn. Your body will convulse and expel it if you make a mistake. That is how you know you are alive. It’s part of being part of the world. It’s part of knowing the world.
You are not only a mammal. You are an ape. You are one of the singing apes.
The purpose of the singing apes is to know the plants, and the other people in the world, such as the animals and the rivers. You are meant to know their names, and their songs. We are the ones who do this. It makes us what we are. When we forget this we get very lost.
Before we came there was no one to sing to the plants and the other people in the world. The world is happy to have us but we keep forgetting.
We wonder if the tree falls in the forest if people are not there to hear it. But the forest is made of fallen trees. The forest is made of people. Instead of wondering if they are there we should be singing to them.
Our species-nature is to spin meaning out of the world and then tell it back to the world. If we only tell it to each other we become something else. We introduce a rupture into the universe and we get very sick. The world keeps on regardless because it doesn’t need us; but we are not doing what makes us us, and that is very sad, and very mistaken. We wonder if God is listening to us; God is everything. We wonder if we are alone; there is no such concept. We wonder if there is meaning; the meaning is the fabric of things and it is what we evolved to take pleasure in.
Your life has been very hard because you have been looking at it through a window instead of living in it. This lack of presence pains you and yet you could not escape it.
If you ask the plant gods their awareness will turn toward you and without anger or love you will be told that you are a mammal and you are a singing ape and you seem to have forgotten.
Shake yourself and feel; learn the names of the other people.
You will receive visions, if you want them. They are not a fantastical future or a shining light; they are your life. You cook food and smell it. You clean your mammal’s nest and hear in excruciating clarity the subtle scrape of the broom bristles on the wood. You walk and look up and see the flock alighting. You will not see it but the birds will be reflected in miniature on the film of your eyes.
You will realize that your life has been waiting for you, and that finally you are ready for it.