Page 8 - ECOlogic Book

So how does the Gaia Hypothesis change this view of perception? Here,
Abram makes a stunning assertion:

. . . by explicitly showing that self-organization is a property of the
surrounding biosphere, Gaia shifts the locus of creativity from the
human intellect to the enveloping world itself.

From there, he goes on to show that the human can no longer be the one to
decide questions of value and meaning, “for value and meaning already
abound in the surrounding landscape.”

The organic world is filled with its own meanings, its own syntheses and
creative transformations,” he says, “ . . .a coherent community of forms, an
expressive universe that moves according to a diverse logic very different
from that logic we attempt to impose.” (Author: You might say an
“ECOlogic”!)

Described in this way, perception takes on a new meaning, more closely
described by “communion” than any other word we have. Abram describes
this as “the constant, ongoing communication between this organism that I
am and the vast organic entity of which I am a part . . . between the
individual microcosm and the planetary macrocosm.”

Even the word “communication” falls short, as Abram acknowledges,
considering that we are, after all, participating in a “reciprocal interaction
between two living presences – my own body and the vast body of the
biosphere . . . a sort of sensuous immersion – a communication without
words.”

This view, strongly supported by recent studies in perception, suggests that
the classical Cartesian subject/object dichotomy is not the way the Gaian
world works. Rather, it works through exchange between an organism and
its environment.

Such a notion has made its appearance on the stage of human awareness
just in the nick of time, if not a tad too late. If indeed we begin to think of
the psyche not as something that resides only in the human, but also as a
property of the ecosystem as a whole, (as some psychologists are now
suggesting), our orientation toward the planet and the natural world shifts
dramatically.

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